The Book of You: A Novel (28 page)

“Robert.” As soon as the word is out I stare into my weak black Earl Grey tea. I take a sip and imagine that my stomach slows in its churning.

Mrs. Lewen prods me further. “You’re comfortably into your second trimester now. The pregnancy’s looking secure. Don’t you think Robert has a right to know?”

Mrs. Lewen’s skin is very pink and slightly rough. Her cheeks are flushed. I wonder if she has high blood pressure.

I shake my head. “He wouldn’t want the baby.”

“You can’t know that. And you’re still pining for him, Clarissa.”

Two years dead, you said. Within a minute of meeting me you said that that’s how long your wife had been gone. Within a minute of meeting me you told me the most outrageous lie anyone’s ever told me. Is it a tale you automatically spin to any woman you might possibly be interested in? Later, you actually said it was a road crash. You even supplied the time of day.

Mrs. Fireman, that man said, putting his knife in my heart before he put it in my face.

I must have exposed you. What happened to me had to have exposed you. There was no hiding me from her in the aftermath. Your horrifying knife wound and blood loss. The police interviews and visits. The witness statement. You were torn out of your normal life, too, because of what happened to me.

Rape victims cannot be named. Even if they might also be murderers. What happened to me kept my name out of the press, but I don’t think you could have kept it out of your house.

I imagine your wife. Make it go away, she must have said. Just make it go away. You are never, ever to see her again, she must have said. Perhaps you had no choice but to make me go away.

Eleanor told me your leg was healing, but you’d always have a limp. She said you’ll need more operations. You’re probably fighting your own battle against post-traumatic stress disorder.

Does your wife drive you to your hospital appointments? Help you with physiotherapy? Is she punishing you? Can your marriage recover from this? Do you want it to? I try not to let the questions take me over, but it isn’t easy. I try not to let myself wonder what she looks like.

After Henry, I swore I’d never again let myself fall in love with a married man. That I’d never again do to another woman what I did to his wife. You took away my choice in this with your lie. I’d never have touched you if I’d known. Our baby wouldn’t exist if I’d known.

Despite everything, I imagine myself kissing your leg, trying to kiss it better.

“You could get in touch with Robert, you know,” Mrs. Lewen says. “You could find out with certainty the situation with his wife. The man who hurt you—he wasn’t a reliable source.”

“The sexual offences liaison officer confirmed Robert’s still married. He lives with her.”

Eleanor told me your wife was in London those two nights you spent with me. She was called away again, unexpectedly, the night you changed your mind and turned up and rescued me. Are you glad you did?

“You can still find out more about him, why he did what he did.”

“I should think that’s pretty obvious.”

What must she feel, to know that her last-minute change of plans helped to save my life?

“You’re not cynical, Clarissa. People do things for complex reasons. From what you’ve said of Robert, he’s a good man, even a heroic man. I’m not denying that what he did to you was wrong, but you must have confused him badly for him to have acted so out of character.”

Was it the promise of seven weeks out of your own life? With me added to make the time of the trial even more memorable and exciting? Maybe you wanted to secure my part in it all with that whopper of a lie. You said you saw me on the train that first day. Maybe you decided then and there that you’d reel me in because you knew your wife would be away in six weeks’ time: an opportunity you didn’t want to miss. Maybe you even saw I was reading Keats and that’s why you said you liked him—you notice everything.

You must have imagined you’d go straight back to how it all was, once the holiday was over. You must have imagined I wouldn’t leave the faintest trace or imprint on you.

“Everything you’ve told me about Robert, all of his actions, suggest his feelings for you were powerful, that you got under his skin and into his head.” Mrs. Lewen has an annoying ability to guess at my fantasies. “Maybe he never expected that. Whatever Robert did to you—”

“Whatever he did to me is irrelevant, given the fact that he saved my life and hurt himself forever by doing it. The other stuff—the big lie about his wife—is actually pretty small by comparison.”

Mrs. Lewen looks pleased with me, despite my impatience with her. “You saved him, too,” she says quietly.

“He was only in danger because of me. That hardly counts as saving him.”

“He may be shy of you, after what happened. Wanting to give you space to recover, not frighten you. He’s your baby’s father, Clarissa. You should find him and talk to him.”

“Don’t you think the news might come as a tiny little bit of a shock? Besides, I don’t want him to be with me just because of the baby. Not to mention the fact that I don’t want to try to take him from his wife—I feel bad enough about her. And I can’t chase him. I can’t . . . foist myself on someone. That’s what that man did to me.”

Eleanor told me that there was a shrine in that man’s house, and too many photographs to count. He knew my life better than I did.

“But Robert’s the great mystery to you,” Mrs. Lewen says. “You need to solve it to move on. You need to understand what Robert did, and why, and what he’s thinking now.”

“You’re wrong,” I say. “I think I do understand him. I think you’ve just helped me to. Robert’s not my great mystery.”

Mrs. Lewen looks surprised. “Then what is?”

“Laura.”

I picture Mrs. Betterton sitting beside my mother, the two of them weeping in each other’s arms while Mr. Betterton and my father stand there looking solemn and sad and awkward.

“I thought her parents might hate me,” I say. “That they might never forgive me. For being the one who survived. For not being Laura.”

Mrs. Lewen tells me to take a few sips of tea before continuing, and I obey her.

“You don’t have any regret that he’s dead, do you?” Mrs. Lewen asks.

The Bettertons told us that the police say it wasn’t Laura on the magazine cover. This fills me with relief, but it’s a very muted kind of relief because I can’t stop feeling haunted by the question of who the woman was. The Bettertons also told us that the forensic people found pornographic photos of Laura in his house, hidden beneath floorboards. Is that where he’d have put the last photos he took of me, too?

He might have got away with murdering me by means of reasonable doubt, by suggesting it could have been you. You were all over my bed, too. He might have said he and I had consensual sex and then he left me alive and happy, only for you to turn up after he was gone and torture and kill me. Court 12 taught me too well.

The police only just discovered he spent a summer in California seven years ago. Laura’s last summer. The trail is cold now, but perhaps not entirely gone. The American police are opening an investigation into her disappearance, at last. They are liaising with the British police, who are combing carefully through all evidence.

Do I regret that he’s dead?

I can’t think of a dumber question than that one. There’s no way I can answer truthfully. If I do, Mrs. Lewen will probably tell the police that I’m an unrepentant murdering psychopath; I really don’t want that in the file they send to the Crown Prosecution Service. And I really don’t want her advising social services to take my baby away.

But I do cut Mrs. Lewen a very large piece of the truth and hand it to her on a plate. “I’m haunted by the idea that I ruined the Bettertons’ only chance of finding out what happened to Laura. He might have told them. Now he never can.”

I don’t want to go back to the university, though I haven’t figured out exactly what I’ll do once all of the broken pieces of me have been glued together and the cracks don’t show so much. If there’s a way of helping to search for Laura, then that’s what I want it to be. Maybe through writing, or publicity, or starting some kind of awareness-raising foundation in her name, with her parents.

“That seems a natural feeling to have, Clarissa,” Mrs. Lewen says. “That seems very human.”

Perhaps she won’t say I’m a psychopath after all.

“I’m not sure though that you’re being entirely honest with yourself when you say that Robert isn’t your great mystery.”

She’ll just say I’m self-deluded. Though I can’t help but admit to myself that Mrs. Lewen is wise in some ways.

Friday, July 24

Newly healed tissue burns easily
. Another of the plastic surgeon’s warnings. Because of it, I am wearing a huge floppy straw hat to keep the sun off my face as I walk with my parents along the seafront. My empire-line dress looks like summer. Only my mother can make a dress that does the contradictory things of stretching and clinging and falling like water all at once. The pale-blue jersey swishes softly. A breeze shapes the light fabric around my small bump. We hurry past the stink of the fast-food kiosks and onto the wooden planks of the pier.

My eyes skim over the amusement arcade building. Just inside the entrance, in the shadows, a tall man stands. He seems to be watching me. I can’t see his face, but I imagine something of you in his stance and begin to walk toward him in a kind of trance. He turns and steps inside, quickly, moving with a limp. I start to run, barely noticing when my hat flies off, hardly hearing my parents calling me back. I forget that I am pregnant, forget that I have lost my stamina after so many months of enforced rest, forget everything but my mad conviction that this man is you.

I halt abruptly near a glass tank full of toy aliens with a large claw hovering over them. I turn in a circle, then another one, then another still, thinking if I can take in the full 360 degrees of the room I will spot you. The pings and pongs of the inane machines are ringing in my ears as I scan the crowds. Somebody screams as they crash their fake car. The fairground organ is deafening, as if I am at a haunted carnival. Colored bulbs flash brightly on the games. Strobe lights make the air pulse.

My heart is pounding, my head is spinning, and I’m hiccuping. My chest is blotchy and damp. All of this could be from the sudden exertion. Or it could be because of the anti-nausea medication. Maybe it’s from both of these things together.

I will never find that man. It was crazy to think he was you. This nightmare arcade is impossibly huge, and there are too many ways out that he could have slipped through. Even if I were to search the entire pier, it would be all too easy to hide and disappear on either of its long sides, in any of its countless rides and buildings.

My parents are at my side, puzzled and worried, tugging at me gently, leading me off the pier, telling me my hat blew into the sea. We step carefully through the brick-paved lanes, my father guiding us through the twisting alleyways, keeping us in the shade. We wander beneath the domes and pinnacles and minarets and chimney stacks of the old palace. I trail my fingers through the broom’s yellow petals.

My parents arrange me near a laburnum in a quiet part of the gardens. Rowena and Annie are coming for lunch on Sunday, and Annie’s bringing Miss Norton down, so my mother wants to buy a few special things. She’s dragging my father along to help her carry them.

I’m glad to be on my own for a while, watching the ladybirds and butterflies. I’m deeply drowsy, probably the fault of the anti-nausea drug again, so I lie down on the grass. People do this sort of thing in this city by the sea. When I remember that I’m not supposed to be on my back, I roll onto my right side, propped on my bent elbow, my hand cupping my head to support it. The pigeons are swarming above the lilacs. They make me think of the hordes of winged monkeys in
The Wizard of Oz
. Mrs. Lewen is always telling me that the monkeys are supposed to be my demons and fears. I don’t tell her that I think those monkeys are ridiculous.

There’s a thump-thump-thump in the back of my skull, and I am reminded yet again of Mrs. Lewen’s favorite film, this time of that intense interlude when the heroine abandons the sepia tints and unearthly quiet to enter the world of Technicolor. The peonies and rockroses and sweet William and foxgloves that border the curving path appear to deepen in their already intense hues of pink and red and purple. At the other end of the path stands a man.

It is the man from the pier. He is very tall, like you. And very lean, like you, though perhaps a bit thinner. He has your broad shoulders, too. He takes a few steps toward me, and I see that he walks with a limp, as you now do. Despite the limp, I think the way he carries himself is beautiful. The late-afternoon sun is behind him. I am too dazzled by it to make out his features, except for the blue eyes that jump out at me as if they’ve been touched by the nearby larkspurs. He is in a heat haze.

My heart is going bump in my chest. I can hear it. I’m sure I can actually hear it. I’m growing dizzy. My head is too heavy for my neck. It slips from the cradle of my hand and thwacks onto the grass. When I open my eyes, I’m on my left side in the recovery position, confused by how I got into it. I blink several times, hard, trying to clear my blurry vision. I sit up and look all around me, still feeling that I am being watched. But I cannot see the man.

I tell myself he was never there. He can’t have been. I am still too ready to think I’m being followed, even if it’s by somebody I actually want to see. It’s a kind of vertigo, and I know that you are a delusion. I remember that hallucinations are one of the extremely rare side effects of this new anti-emetic. Fuzzy eyes are on the list, too, as well as dizziness and altered heartbeat. I seem to have all of it. I’m going to have to ask Dr. Haynes to change me to a different medicine again. But these are small things. Temporary things. Fixable things. I am here and I am alive.

I rest my hand on my belly. The baby stomps sharply on my bladder as if to tell me she is fine, and I make a noise that is a cry and a laugh at once. I think of the fairy tale my father used to read to me about the maiden whose hands are chopped off, and how she suffers great trials. All that she loses is returned to her, and she is rewarded with more than she ever had. Her hands grow back, too.