The Book of You: A Novel (24 page)

Tuesday

C
LARISSA WANDERED THROUGH
the outside market. Already he was in jail, remanded in custody. No bail this time. She’d heard early that morning from DC Hughes, who was about to go on holiday for two weeks and wanted to let her know before he left that she shouldn’t worry anymore; Mr. Solmes would be out of range for quite some time.

Beneath her boots she wore thick socks. After she’d rummaged in her drawer for stockings that morning, out of habit, she couldn’t then bring herself to put them on. Her thighs were bare, freezing under her coat and dress. This made her furious.

“I’ve decided you’re the Lady of Shalott,” said a voice.

She turned to Robert, just a few feet behind her, and her anger evaporated. “Is that a good thing?”

“Have coffee with me. There’s time.” He steered her toward the place on the corner. “It’s not going to be pretty if Tomlinson goes into the witness box. We’ll need fortification.” He put a latte in front of her, and the sugar, and held out an old book.

It was a slim edition of “The Lady of Shalott,” just the one poem, illustrated with carefully placed reproductions of various scenes as depicted by different painters. “This is completely wonderful,” she said. “How can I not have seen it before?”

“Something I picked up secondhand,” he said.

She paused over Waterhouse’s painting of the Lady sitting in her boat, floating toward Camelot and death, and looking as though she had a small baby bump, a symptom of her desire for Lancelot. Clarissa wondered if it was a phantom pregnancy arising out of the Lady’s wish to bear his child. She voiced this thought to Robert, then worried that he’d think she still saw babies and pregnancy everywhere.

He said, possibly with restrained amusement, “I’d never have seen that.” He hesitated. “I want to draw you. Will you let me, when this is all over?”

She felt what it would be like, sitting as he wanted, as he arranged her, letting him look at her. He wouldn’t just look. He would touch. She would touch back.

There would be no Rafe spying on them anymore.

“Yes.” Her voice was very soft. She held the book toward him, to return it, thinking it was a rare and expensive old edition, not quite daring to let herself wonder if he’d got hold of it since they’d met, despite his casualness. She wondered also if he’d been looking over the poems recently, too, and the paintings, as if she were a teacher he wanted to impress—the idea touched her.

“It’s yours,” he said.

“I can’t.” She put it on the table gently. “It’s too special a thing.”

He laid his hand over the book. “It was made for you.”

She’d grown habituated to refusing gifts, to seeing each one as an assault. But that wasn’t what this was.

Hardly daring to do it, she rested her own hand on the book, too. Very lightly, she pressed the tips of her fingers against his: there was no mistaking that one; he couldn’t possibly think the contact was accidental. “Thank you,” she said softly.

A
NTONY
T
OMLINSON LUMBERED
toward the witness box. He wore dark jeans and a long-sleeved white shirt, untucked over his large stomach. His tie moved her: the pathos of his failed attempt to polish himself for the occasion.

He gave his account of what happened when he and Doleman got back from the nightclub. “The others were dozing. Carlotta was awake in the chair. Asked if she could pay us for drugs with sex. It was her idea. I said, ‘Are you sure?’ She said, ‘Yeah.’ She led us to the bedroom. I gave her a wrap of crack cocaine and a wrap of heroin. She smoked both.”

Sally Martin had said that Lottie charged forty to eighty pounds as a working girl, depending on whether the man wanted a blow job or full sex. By Tomlinson’s account, Lottie had proposed a threesome in exchange for twenty pounds’ worth of drugs. It just didn’t compute.

M
R
. M
ORDEN GOT
to his feet, a boxer eager to throw his punches. “You say Miss Lockyer could have got out of that van at any time?”

“Yes.”

“May I ask the jury to look at page eighty-two of their files?”

The white van again. And something on its side door that Clarissa couldn’t believe she hadn’t noticed before. She leaned forward to peer more closely, shifting her feet as she did so and stepping on her bag, which she’d placed beneath the table before sitting down.

Tuesday, 10 March, 3:20 p.m.

The noise is so piercing and sudden. Everyone is looking in my direction. Jurors are slapping hands over their ears.

I do not yet understand what is happening. I do not yet understand that it is all because of you. You have found me again.

Everything seems to be in slow motion, like an underwater pantomime. Robert is turning in his chair, managing to seem both urgent and calm at once. His lips are moving, soundlessly. They seem to be shaping the word “below.” He’s pointing to my desk and tapping it. Annie is bending down, and when she comes up, as if for air, she drops my bag on the table in front of me.

I lift the bag and the decibel level intensifies. In a kind of bewildered nightmare, I begin to dig through it, not caring what I heap on the table in full view of them all. My coin purse, a hairbrush, lip balm, my switched-off phone, a sewing pattern, moisturizer, Robert’s precious book, keys, the notebook.

The siren blares all the time, so piercingly I think it will never stop. And then I have it, silver and no bigger than a key ring, shrieking in my hand. The personal attack alarm DC Hughes gave me. I’d forgotten it was there. I must have moved my shoe onto the rip cord and activated it through my bag.

I pull at the cord, my hands shaking, but nothing happens. I search for a button to turn it off, but I can’t find one, can’t make it stop, can’t remember what DC Hughes said to do to shut it up. My fingers have healed since burning them, but they are throbbing again and stiff, as if I were still wearing the bandages. Robert’s hands are on mine, and he pulls the alarm from my grasp. He gives it one firm twist, and the room is silent.

“I’m so sorry.” As I speak, I have a sense of what a transgression it is, my own voice in this room. My ears are ringing. My words sound loud and echoey. I am certain my face is poppy red. I glance over at the dock. Four of the five are looking at me, Azarola with a poker player’s inscrutability, Tomlinson and Sparkle with pity, Godfrey with contempt and irritation. Only Doleman stares straight ahead like a guard at Buckingham Palace.

Maybe the judge will throw me in jail for the night, for contempt of court. I am scared to look up at him, but I make myself, just a quick glance, and I see that his expression is benevolent.

Mr. Morden and Mr. Harker toss sympathetic and encouraging smiles in my direction. The man who sits on my left—who hardly ever reacts to anything—gives my arm an awkward pat of solidarity. Someone else passes the water jug to Annie, and she fills a plastic cup and wraps my fingers around it and watches while I drink, then looks satisfied and takes the empty cup from me. Robert turns in his seat as if to check that I’m still in one piece.

A day that began with the loveliness of Robert and his book has crumbled into this. Even in prison you are still getting at me. But the kindness all around me still seems stronger than you. Even in a room so full of ugliness and fear and meanness it is still stronger.

Mr. Morden resumed at the judge’s nod, putting the interruption decidedly behind them. “Please read the warning on the van’s sliding door, aloud to the court.”

Tomlinson read slowly. “
Warning: This door can only be opened from the outside.
”

“Which means not from inside,” Mr. Morden said. “And the door on the van’s other side carries an identical warning. Miss Lockyer could not have simply opened a door and got out, could she?”

Tuesday, March 10, 4:40 p.m.

I haven’t taken in anything Mr. Morden said, though I can feel in the air that he has been saying important things.

Eyes on the floor, I stumble out of Court 12 in a daze. For once I’m not dreaming about walking to the station with Robert. I’m not imagining what it will feel like to sit next to him on the train. I’m not wondering if I might get the courage to touch him accidentally-on-purpose. I’m not plotting about how I might be able to brush up against him as if the crush of other people is to blame and I just can’t help it. I’m not full of the fantasies and plans I’m usually full of by the end of each day; they are one of my secret pleasures.

“Clarissa.”

I have reached the bottom of the stairs. I blink in confusion, as if Robert has just woken me up. I hadn’t even realized he was near me, which must be a true first.

Yet again you’ve overwhelmed everything else. You’ve overwhelmed me. But I let you. I won’t let you again.

“I think this is yours.” Carefully, Robert places the alarm in my hand.

“I think I may leave it at home tomorrow.” I drop it in my bag.

“Tomorrow will be a better day.”

To my surprise, I’m actually smiling. “This one did start so beautifully.”

I remind myself that it was a false alarm only. I remind myself to be grateful that I don’t even need that alarm anymore.

And I don’t need the notebook anymore, either. I vow that after today you will never again be second person present to me. Not ever. No more. That is no longer what you are.

Wednesday

M
R
. M
ORDEN GAVE
himself a shake, as if steeling himself to confront something unpleasant. “Do you find Carlotta Lockyer attractive?”

“You don’t have to find someone attractive to have sex with them. I thought I was doing her a favor.”

Annie’s hand fell flat onto the table, making a small slapping sound.

Tomlinson spluttered on in the face of Mr. Morden’s hammed speechlessness. “I had drugs. She wanted drugs. It was her idea. She said she’d give me sex for drugs. It was only for a few seconds—I didn’t like the feel of it. I thought that didn’t count as sex, but my barrister explained to me that any penetration of a vagina by a penis is defined as sex, no matter how brief.”

Mr. Morden looked as if he was going to vomit. “I’m done with this witness,” he said.

R
OBERT SHOOK HIS
head as soon as the door to the courtroom shut behind them. “He’s a horror.” The statement was delivered without inflection. The others all nodded agreement.

“Gee whiz,” Annie said. “What’s sex? Do you mean if I put my penis in your vagina we’re actually having sex?”

“Do me a favor,” Grant said.

A
FEW MINUTES
later, Clarissa and Annie and Robert were sitting in a wine bar around the corner. It had been Robert’s idea to stop for a quick drink. Annie nearly fell off her chair when she looked up and saw Grant standing by their table, ready to join them. “We’re safe with you, Clarissa,” Grant said. “Anyone attacks us—we’ve got your alarm.”

“Any special reason for carrying it?” Robert asked, as if casually.

She told a literal truth. “I forgot I had it. Someone gave it to me a while ago.”

“Seriously, Clarissa.” Grant sat down. “What are you? Five four? Seven stone? You’ve seen the size of the boys. Think how easily they could just lift you away.”

She tilted the huge glass of red wine Robert had bought her, watching it swirl, feeling it hit her bloodstream.

“I don’t like thinking about that,” Robert said.

Robert was already on his third pint, but the only sign of its effect was that every time she turned to look at him, she’d find his eyes on her face, studying her too intently to avert them.

Annie played with her half-drunk pint of bitter. “That’s why personal safety alarms are good.”

“For someone who can manage to use them,” Clarissa said. “Obviously not me.”

Grant stretched out his legs, so he was almost lying down, and folded his arms. “Tomlinson’s big. My kind of size. She’s your kind of size, Clarissa. Imagine him with his knees on your shoulders like she said they were during the blow job. You’d snap.”

She sat up straighter. “The mattress was on a low frame in the photo. In Tomlinson’s version of events, he said she was lying on the bed on her back while he stood next to it for the blow job. That can’t be right. Her head wouldn’t be high enough to reach him.”

“Let’s try it, Clarissa. Convince me. Here and now.” Grant pointed. “Plenty of room behind the table.”

She glanced at Robert. His mouth had stiffened. His eyes had narrowed.

“Maybe your wife can help with your investigative work.” She gathered her coat and bag.

“Or maybe you have a rubber doll?” Annie was also readying herself to leave.

“See you tomorrow,” Clarissa said. She let herself sneak one last look at Robert. Please come, she thought. Please, please come with me.

Robert swallowed the last two inches of his pint, stood up, and said exactly the words she wanted to hear. “I’ll come with you, Clarissa,” he said.

“He can be your new personal attack alarm,” said Annie.

“I’d like that,” she said, addressing both of them at once.

S
HE STEPPED ONTO
the train and let herself fall into a window seat. He sat down next to her. She could smell the beer on his breath. She wanted to taste it. He stared straight into her face and said her name in that simple, confirming way she’d liked when they first met over the Japanese pattern book. He swooped in to kiss her on the lips so swiftly before swooping away again, she almost wondered if it had happened at all.

As the train pulled into Bath, she fumbled on the floor for her bag, leaning over him to reach for it, knowing he could smell her shampoo. They stepped off the train, and he walked alongside her, down the stairs, through the ticket gates, out the station doors. His hand was on her arm. He guided her into a taxi and got in next to her.

She wasn’t sure how she got out of the taxi, was only vaguely aware of his dropping money into the driver’s hand as she fumbled for her keys, somehow getting into the building and even introducing him to Miss Norton, who stepped out of her flat and into the hallway to intercept them. Miss Norton beamed as Robert gently shook her hand, but they quickly got away and were up the stairs to Clarissa’s flat.

As soon as the door closed behind them, they were tugging each other’s coats off and she was wrapped around him, tasting him properly at last, his mouth, his skin, her hands in his hair. She could smell his own smell, and the clean lime note of his aftershave, which she thought he’d only recently started wearing, lovely and still there, though faint at the end of the day. He was tugging the silk jersey of her dress from behind her with one hand, watching the effect as it clung to her breasts and waist and hips while moving his other hand over the fabric. He started to slip the dress off her shoulders. Before she let it fall to the floor, she stepped out of her boots and socks, trying but failing to be graceful, not wanting him to see how very unglamorous they were, all the while pushing from her head the reason why she still couldn’t bring herself to touch a pair of stockings and probably never would again.

He was leading her toward the bedroom, somehow knowing where it was, perhaps his fireman’s instinct for house layouts, and she was sitting at the edge of the bed she hadn’t slept in for two and a half weeks and he was kneeling on the floor, his head against her stomach, his hands hooked into the sides of her underwear, kissing her belly, undoing her bra.

She watched him pull his sweater over his head, quickly. Another thing he did with certainty. There was a scar on his shoulder, a branding the color of his lips that was roughly two square inches, and another not far from it, slightly smaller and on his chest.

“Molten lead,” he said, seeing her look at them. “From a roof.”

She wondered if it was the accident she’d read about when she searched for him on the Internet. It scared her, that he could die, that something terrible could happen to him any ordinary day or night at work, however expertly trained he was at minimizing the risk. The scars made her feel the truth of that in a way that the news stories hadn’t.

“They’re nothing. One of the guys who mentored me when I first joined, Al, you should have seen him. The Fire Service was a different world then. He’d push it as far as he could. He liked the burn marks. He was a work of art.” He smiled. “He liked showing them to women. Lots of women. He once took his shirt off in a bar and started flexing his muscles, started . . .”

His voice trailed off as she rose onto her knees, drew him toward her, traced her fingers over each scar, then her lips, examining them; then she was kissing his stomach, so flat and beautiful, and his belly button, which made him catch his breath. “It’s not fair for my clothes to be off but not yours,” she said, making him laugh as she unbuttoned his trousers. He pulled them off himself, at the same time as his boxer shorts.

He was pushing her onto her back, on top of the mossy-green quilt cover with red blossoms that she’d made since meeting him, that she’d bought the thread for the first day she ever saw him, that the man whose name she never wanted in her head again hadn’t seen or touched or photographed, that she herself had yet to sleep beneath.

“Clarissa,” he said. “Open your eyes. Look at me.” She did. “Did you know”—he forced a small gasp from her—“this is sex.”

“Yes.”

He smoothed her hair from her face. His mouth was against hers as he whispered, “In case you weren’t sure of the definition.”

“I’m sure.”

“Good.”