The Disappearance of Emily Marr (36 page)
‘I’m saying this is a personal agenda on the part of Nina Meeks, not a story of national importance. Inquests into road traffic accidents take place every day of the week up and down the country. There’s nothing about this one that merits more than a report in the local paper, or maybe a summary of the more lurid elements in the
Daily Mail
.’
‘But the fact that there
is
so much interest suggests Meeks’ instincts were right, people
are
finding meaning in this one in particular. Don’t you think it’s possible that every so often we get a young woman in the public eye who is representative of her generation, and Emily Marr is ours? She’s a Christine Keeler figure, a Monica Lewinsky, an important symbol?’
‘Our first poster girl for immorality this century?’ the presenter asked, clarifying.
‘Well, I could name plenty of others who might take that honour.’
There was knowing laughter and then the supporter spoke up once more: ‘But there’s nothing new about having an affair with a married man and not thinking about the consequences, is there? All this “old morals” stuff the
Press
is peddling is hogwash. We all know there’s been sexual infidelity since time immemorial; there’s always been this sort of scandal in communities. And the man Marr had an affair with is hardly Jack Profumo, is he? Or Bill Clinton? He’s not a major political name —’
‘He’s one of our leading surgeons,’ the presenter interjected, ‘with an international reputation.’
‘Yes, but he’s not a public figure in their league, is he? He’s not a household name.’
‘He is now!’
The one I thought of as my defender grew exasperated. ‘Look, if you want my opinion, this is a witch-hunt, pure and simple, and we should be very careful about taking part in it, because normal citizens are not equipped to deal with sudden persecution of this intensity. This young woman has had no preparation, no media training. She could be sitting at home watching this, completely terrified by the situation she finds herself in.’
‘I doubt that! She may not be working the press right now, but who’s to say she won’t pop up later this year in the jungle or the
Big Brother
house? Publishers would pay a fortune for her story, if she acts quickly enough.’
The retired coroner, asked his opinion at last, said, ‘I’m pleased to see the public being educated in the nature of coroners’ inquiries, the work these unsung heroes do. Inquests like this answer important questions for loved ones, they explain what would otherwise have remained unexplained, and that can be a great consolation to surviving relatives.’
On this gentler note, the presenter brought the discussion to a close. I told myself the story would get no further than this cable channel, which couldn’t have huge viewing figures, especially on a Saturday night, when most people were out meeting friends, letting their hair down, starting love affairs that were nobody’s business but their own.
The next day, I read Nina’s belated obituary of Sylvie, published that morning in the sister Sunday of the
Press
. People reported on Twitter and other sites that they’d been reduced to tears by it. There were, when I looked, 812 comments posted under the online version. If anything, activity seemed to increase at the weekend. Was this all anyone did? Read about how sexually depraved a woman they’d never met was and post a comment saying the country had gone to the dogs?
Did Arthur read the obituary too? And if he did, had he, as I had, lingered on one sentence in particular: ‘
It was Sylvie who was driving that terrible morning, yes, but the truth is she was driven to that tragic ending’
?
What were his feelings about the monstrous circus that now surrounded the deaths of his wife and sons? Did reporters hound him as they did me, and if they’d run him to ground, where was that ground? The cottage in Sussex, where Sylvie and the boys had spent their last night? The Inn on the Hill? His office in Harley Street?
Where was he?
Was anyone comforting him as he needed to be comforted?
Even then, I longed with all my heart for it to be me.
On Monday morning, with reporters and photographers multiplying in the street outside, my doorbell rang incessantly and the thumping on the door could be felt in vibrations on the first floor, in rattling window frames and shuddering floorboards. Voices called up to me from below, sometimes rough, as if waking me in an emergency, other times more musical – ‘Em-i-lee, Em-i-lee’ – in the hope of enchanting me to an open window, preferably half naked and camera-ready. They did not seem to consider that mine was only one of three flats in the building and that others might be disturbed by this harassment. By chance, the couple in the lower flat were on holiday; the occupants of the flat upstairs, three medical students from St Barnabas’, kept irregular hours and so I could never quite be sure when they were in or out. A point of particular drama and distress came when one of the students, a Malaysian called Ashraf, let himself in downstairs and reporters forced the door as he tried to close it behind him. His footsteps, the soft, familiar ones of a neighbour who often came home at dawn, were followed by a stampede of others, coming to a halt, inevitably, at my door. I don’t know how long the hammering and shouting went on but I wedged a heavy armchair against the frame and earplugs in my ears to try to wait it out. I had no doubt that poor Ashraf’s image would appear online, with the suggestion that he was yet another lover of the murdering slag on the first floor.
In the evening, watching from a painful angle by the living-room window, I saw Marcus Laing come down the road on his way home from work and, reaching his gate, turn to face the assembled media next door. His demeanour was relaxed, his expression open-minded. A minute later, my bell rang in the short, abrupt way of a genuine caller, as opposed to the lengthy din caused by a thumb pressed down for minutes at a time.
I did not answer, of course.
‘See? You’re wasting your time, guys,’ I heard him say as he returned to the pack. ‘She’s gone away. We haven’t seen her since last week. Why don’t you try her work?’
I didn’t hear the response, but guessed he was being told I had failed to turn up for work again. Perhaps Charlotte had even announced my dismissal.
‘There you go, she must have left town.’ I didn’t know whether he was trying to protect me or just voicing wishful thinking. ‘I don’t blame her, either,’ he added, ‘with you lot on her case!’
‘Know her well, do you?’ one of them called out. ‘A friendly kind of neighbour, is she? Got a thing about married men, apparently,’ which caused the rest to shout with laughter and rain further questions down on poor Marcus. His gait visibly tenser, he paced back up the path, head down as he turned in to his own gate, so I couldn’t see his face.
Switching on the TV later that evening, hoping to be distracted by a film or documentary, I caught the opening minutes of BBC’s
Newsnight
:
‘Tonight we’ll be reporting on the first big internet story of 2012: the overnight sensation of Emily Marr. Just who is Marr and why has she become one of the top trending subjects on Twitter? Joining us in the studio will be the woman who set the story alight in the first place, the
Press
columnist Nina Meeks, who is fairly certain
she
knows the answer. I should say that, in the interests of fair play, we have invited Emily Marr to come and defend herself, but as yet have had no reply from the woman at the centre of this story, the woman who, remarkably, has yet to speak to a single journalist or post any message online.’
And nor would she.
Emily
Nina’s wish was granted and I became, for a time, Britain’s most hated woman. In fairness, the press were only the prosecutors: they brought the recommendation that I be hated, but people still had to hate me of their own accord.
I gave up noting the names of my detractors early on, even in passing. I had – and still have, presumably – tens of thousands of them, hundreds of thousands possibly. Visualising the reach of the internet was giddying, overwhelming; the feeling it gave me reminded me of the aftermath of my mother’s death, when Dad had never been able to explain where it was she had gone. He spoke of heaven and angels and eternal rest, leaving me to make sense of the abyss on my own.
This was a new kind of abyss.
The haters pursued me from the morning of Nina’s first article, mostly by email, since I had closed my Facebook account, and then, when my mobile phone number was widely published, by voicemail and text message. Later, perhaps most disturbingly, vitriol arrived by post and I would amass bagfuls of it in the small flat, not daring to throw it in the communal bins for fear that members of the resident media might steal and publish it. My ‘crime’ elicited the full gamut of hysterical responses, from threats of death and rape to declarations of admiration and love; I even had three marriage proposals, one from a man already married (‘but that doesn’t bother
you
, Emily, does it?’).
I soon found myself in a catch-22: I couldn’t ignore the letters and leave them unopened, or shut down my email account or change my phone number, in case Arthur wanted to contact me by one of these methods, and yet the messages I had to endure in (vain) search of one from him only reminded me, one by one, hour by hour, of how worthless I was, how unlikely ever to be communicated with again by a decent and civilised person. How implausible the notion that a man like him could ever have loved me.
Funny, but over time it was the supporters rather than the critics who made me most anxious. While the opponents got their hatred off their chests and retreated – they wanted no actual relationship with me, only a temporary target for their righteousness – the ‘fans’ persisted. Since my address was apparently publicly available (a photograph of Walnut Grove was more often than not preferred, to illustrate the gracious and élite social circle I had infiltrated and made toxic), it was only a matter of time before they began to turn up in person. Some were awed, speechless figures at the gate, their phones held aloft in readiness for a silhouette at the window, others were more forceful, coming to the door with the photographers to buzz insistently and, in their case, post passionate handwritten notes through the letterbox. A handful in particular would not take no for an answer. One woman came night after night, until I sobbed into the intercom, ‘Please leave me alone. I
have
to sleep.’ We both fell silent then, I at my flat door and she on the front step, stunned perhaps to have heard my voice, and then I heard the letterbox rattle once more: she’d posted a message.
You are not alone
, it read.
I know exactly what you are feeling. Your pain is my pain
.
And so on.
I soon discovered that such people were also acting on my behalf, disturbing a certain other Grove resident in their attempts to clear my name. Early one morning during the week after the verdict, my buzzer rang and, knowing it to be too early for the photographers and sensing unusual command in its application, I picked up the intercom.
‘Yes?’
‘Nina Meeks. Is that you, Emily? Can I have a word?’
I let her in, realising after a full minute of waiting that she did not intend coming up to the flat but that I was to join her in the hallway downstairs. Even then – more than ever, perhaps – this was for her a question of power, every move a strategic one. My heart thudded at the sight of her, the sound of her, the woman who had ruined my life.
If I were you, Emily, I’d think seriously about disappearing
, she’d said, and, long before that,
He wouldn’t dare
… That’s what she’d said to Sylvie that first day in the café: why had I not recognised it as the warning it had been?
She did not spare me the courtesy of a greeting. ‘Call your little friends off,’ she said curtly, as I drew up in front of her. ‘I’ve had them on the phone all hours of the night and at my door leaving hate mail.’
‘What?’ I assumed she must be talking about the doorsteppers and was unable to understand how she could have been affected at the far end of the Grove, Arthur’s end. ‘I would have thought you could do more about the reporters than I can.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, not the media. I mean the imbecilic members of the public trying to harass me in my own home. Ed caught one of them posting
dog shit
through the door.’
Circumstances forbade me from finding this funny. Not quite meeting her hate-filled glare, I began to defend myself: ‘How do you know they’re anything to do with me? They could be objecting to something else you’ve written? You’ve claimed plenty of scalps.’ The phrase came from the depths of memory – the party perhaps, which now felt like a hundred years ago, thousands, before my own scalp became worth claiming.
She smirked, unimpressed. ‘Oh, do me a favour, Emily. It’s fairly obvious who they’ve been inspired by.’
Mystified by this, I could only gape like an idiot, at a loss as to how to respond. Of course, later I saw online a picture of a group of people wearing T-shirts printed with the slogan:
EMILY
MARR
,
GET
OFF
HER
BACK
! They did not have their own website, at least not one that I could find, but the caption referred to them as a protest group, one that had heckled
Press
staff as they came and went at their
offices in Farringdon and, presumably, Nina at home.
I took a long, shaky breath, wanting to tell her how miserable she had made me, how unnecessarily cruel I thought her act of revenge. It could neither bring back the Woodhalls nor make any difference to Arthur and me, since he had finished with me long before she’d made a public enemy of me. No amount of misery heaped on me by her and her colleagues could make me feel worse than I had in the car park that day at the coroner’s court, when I’d been rejected by him once and for all. But no words came. That early morning in February, standing in the hall under a lightless bulb, it was my first – and only – opportunity to confront her, to ask her to explain
herself
, but I was too cowardly to take it. Watching me cower and choke, she tossed me a last scornful look before leaving. ‘Just call them off, all right, or I’ll have no choice but to get the police involved.’