The Woman He Loved Before (9 page)

‘Oh, Jack,’ I said, sitting up to wrap my arms around him, pulling him in close. After a moment’s resistance, he let himself go and rested his head on my chest, sliding down in the bed to allow me to comfort him. ‘Oh, Jack.’

We sat in silence. I was trying to digest, process, the enormity of what he must have been through: finding her like that, trying to get her back, and holding her lifeless body until help came. But there was no help, no one could help, it was too late. It was simply other people arriving. More people to witness the tragedy that had befallen Jack and Eve.

‘Everything about it was wrong. Eve wasn’t clumsy, didn’t ever fall over or bump into things, but then she always wore her trousers and jeans too long and she was always running up and down those stairs and it only takes one moment to trip. I don’t know, but I still can’t imagine her falling down the stairs for no reason.’

His body tensed again, and I couldn’t see his face but I could tell it had twisted again in bitterness. ‘The police couldn’t imagine that happening either, so they launched a murder investigation.’

‘On the strength of not being able to imagine her falling down the stairs?’

‘Not only that. The upstairs looked as if it had been ransacked, there were what they thought were signs of a struggle, but no signs of forced entry, so they came up with the idea that maybe it wasn’t an accident, that maybe she’d been “helped” down the stairs. Or maybe her neck was broken and she was thrown down the stairs to hide it. They couldn’t tell, of course, because the body had been moved.’

A cold feeling began to edge, like a caterpillar on a branch, up my spine.

‘They arrested me ten days later.’

‘Oh God, Jack.’

He snuggled closer to me, thankfully seeming to take comfort in my presence. ‘I didn’t care. She was gone, nothing could bring her back and I stopped caring about anything. I answered their questions, but in a haze. I didn’t even have a solicitor.’ Stroking him, soothing him was the only thing I could do, but it didn’t seem enough. ‘I don’t even know how long I was in there, everything was such a blur. My father came and put an end to it. He said if they didn’t have any evidence then they had to let me go. They released me but said they were going to keep the case open.

‘I was so angry with my father for making the torture end. I hadn’t wanted rescuing; I had wanted to stay there, because, even though they were accusing me of something dreadful, while I was in there I wasn’t out in the world where she was gone and I had to think about funerals and packing up her things and waking up to another day without her.’

‘Your dad couldn’t have done anything else, Jack, surely you see that? You’re his son, he couldn’t let you be subjected to that for a second longer than necessary. That’s what parents do. Surely you can understand that.’

‘Of course, I can understand. But at the time … things have been so very difficult and complicated with my father for years. It’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t grown up with a man like him as a father. I used to idolise him – he’s so successful at everything he does – and I wanted to be exactly like him. But when I got to fifteen, and it came to the time where I had to prove that I wanted to be like him in every way, I couldn’t do it. Since then he’s made it clear that I’m not good enough, not manly enough in the way that he is. I can’t do right in his eyes – I prefer football to rugby, I got “easy” offers for Oxford and Cambridge, chose Oxford when he went to Cambridge, but I didn’t get a first. I followed in his footsteps into law but wouldn’t let him help me
get a job. That’s why I was so enraged that with this – this thing that I was going through that he couldn’t possibly understand – he had to come riding in to try to make things better again. He had to fix it and fix my pathetic life, as he saw it, in the process.

‘I wanted to knock his block off but, at the same time, I wanted him – anyone, really – to look after me. I was so confused and angry. I didn’t resist when he and my mother packed up some of my belongings and moved me into their home. They took over most of the funeral arrangements and told me what to do on the day, what to say, where to stand, who to thank for their condolences. I don’t think of that day as Eve’s funeral because it was nothing like she would have wanted.’

‘In what way?’

‘It was elaborate and showy, and because she had no family there were lots of people there she barely knew. They had sermons and readings and hymns when she’d never set foot in a church in her adult life. I was simply grateful I could play the grieving husband and not participate. I sat on the sidelines, dressed in black, nodding and shaking hands and accepting cups of tea.’

‘You weren’t playing the grieving husband, you
were
the grieving husband.’

‘What I mean is, me being quiet in the background fitted in with their idea of what a grieving husband is like. Whereas in reality, being there was something I had to do. It wasn’t my chance to say goodbye as it should have been – I did that much later, when I went to Bartholomew Square on what would have been our wedding anniversary and sat and watched people coming out after getting married. I watched them start their lives together, remembering that feeling. That was the day I said goodbye to Eve.’

‘You got married in Brighton Register Office?’

‘Yes. Like I said, she wasn’t the showy type. We wanted a small wedding with minimal fuss. She wore a dress she’d had for years and the only two people there were Grace and Rupert as our witnesses.’

I was humbled by Eve. By the love Jack obviously had for her. By the way he wanted to suffer because she was gone from his life, and by the way they had obviously conducted their relationship: privately, quietly, intimately. I never would have thought that someone like Jack – someone who drove an expensive car, wore almost exclusively designer clothes, and had a big house – would have married in such a small, unassuming way.

Eve obviously did that to him – brought out the quiet side of him, brought out the side of him that I had fallen in love with. Eve must have been extraordinary.

Was I like that to him? Because he still had his ostentatious side. He still had moments when he wanted to be flash and play the big ‘I AM’ and it pulled me up short. It sounded as though Eve had been able to temper that in him: straight away or over time?

‘What else do you want to know?’ he asked, wearily. He did not want to say any more and I did not want to know any more because I was suddenly so scared by the love and grief he had for her. It was huge and it was unassailable; and it probably meant he would never have enough room in his heart for me. He would be constantly trying to fit me around the expanse that Eve still occupied.

‘Erm, nothing,’ I said. ‘Well, not nothing. I mean, this is big stuff we’ve talked about, so how about we talk again another time?’

Jack lifted his head, studied me for a few seconds. ‘Are you sure? I don’t want you to feel as if I’m hiding things from you.’

‘I don’t think you’re hiding anything from me. It’s just this is getting a bit intense: maybe we should take a step back.’

He was up on his knees in an instant, frowning at me. ‘Are you saying you don’t want to get married?’

Was that what I was saying? I hadn’t consciously meant that, but now he’d broached it, maybe that was what I was hinting at. I was starting to think that perhaps he wasn’t ready. You don’t get over that kind of love in three years; you probably don’t ever get
over it. Why would you want to marry someone when your heart belonged to another?

‘Maybe we should date for a bit longer? There’s no rush is there? We should carry on dating and—’

‘I’ve only been in love with two women in my life,’ he interrupted. ‘Eve and now you. They’re different types of love, because you’re different women. But, Libby, make no mistake about this: I love you and I want to spend the rest of my life with you.’

Breathing deeply, a slow steady in and out, I looked down at the valleys and hills that our bodies made in my white duvet cover.

‘I can’t pretend Eve didn’t exist,’ he said, ‘in the same way that I can’t pretend that you’re not the most important person in my life right now. I love you as much as I love her.
Loved
her.’

‘I know bugger all about long-term relationships, and I know nothing about marriage having never been in either, but I do know I’m—’

‘Scared that I don’t love you as much as I loved Eve? That I won’t be able to love you as much because I’m still in love with her?’

I hung my head and nodded, ashamed at how petulant and childish that sounded when repeated back to me. I hated sounding so needy, so unsure of myself.

‘I promise you, she is the past. You are my present and my future. I can’t rewrite my past, and I wouldn’t want to, but,’ he came closer to me, took my hands and waited until I raised my head to look at him, ‘I love you.’

It was different this time when he said it. He’d said it before and it was a wonderful thing to hear, but this time there was a new element – a reassurance that in his heart I had the greater part. In every part of him that felt anything, it was me he felt it for. This time, I couldn’t mistake what those three words meant: ‘You. Only you.’

I nodded my understanding.

‘Will you still marry me?’ he asked through his huge grin.

I nodded again.

His beam took over his entire face. ‘We’re going to be so happy, you’ll see. I promise you, we’re going to be so happy.’

jack

The first time I
noticed
Libby was a few minutes after I started talking to her. It was after she told me that I was rubbish at apologising and I was rubbish at taking the piss out of her.

She’d intrigued me by walking out of the showroom when I interrupted her car purchase, but it was the way contempt curled her lip and raised her eyebrow while causing her nostrils to flare that got that kick going down below. She didn’t notice me scanning her body as she stormed away from me: the slenderness of her legs in jeans sloping up to the neat curve of her bum; the firm, fullness of her waist and chest; the gentle shape of her neck disappearing under her masses and masses of shiny, straight black hair.

When Libby glared at me, resolutely refusing to be drawn in by my second apology, I saw her all over again and felt an unfamiliar boom, as powerful as a bomb exploding, in my chest. It was the explosion of something I thought had died a long time ago. I
liked
her. And, at that time, I did not like many people. I was not capable of liking people, especially not women, especially not in a non-sexual way. I was consumed by a selfishness and arrogance that I didn’t dare let go of until I found a new persona to hide behind. I suddenly had a reason to want to be someone else because the woman in front of me would accept nothing short of a personality transplant.

‘You’ll get no arguments on that from me,’ she replied when I said I’d been an idiot for messing about with Gareth’s sale, and I knew there and then I had to change. Grace had been telling me for months that I couldn’t carry on indefinitely doing what I was doing – screwing women and then saying I wasn’t ready for a relationship but that I wanted to be friends. Grace was right, of course, but I hadn’t heeded that until Libby stood in front of me and told me she didn’t like me.

I suddenly felt like a teenager in love with the best-looking girl at school – desperate to get her to notice me; eager to be given a chance.

I sit by her bed now, watching her sleep her drug-induced slumber, holding her right hand between my two hands as if in prayer. I want to pray for her and for us, but I fell out with God a long time ago, so it would be churlish to go back to Him now – especially if He answers in the way He did last time, if He lets the woman I’m married to die.

‘Libby, my beautiful, beautiful Libby,’ I whisper into the hush of her hospital room. The whole of the left side of her body is bruised and swollen, huge sections of her face and head are covered in dressings. She is wounded and hurt, battered and almost broken.

From a distance she is a mass of bandages and damage, but closer there are pieces of her that are as they were before.

The curve of her jaw on the right side of her face is untouched. I noticed the bone structure of her features and jaw when she lifted her head to catch the rain as the sky opened on that July afternoon – I’d wanted to reach out and trace my finger along the outline of her face.

Her full, rounded lips don’t have any marks from the crash either. I’d wanted to kiss the flakes of croissants off those lips when we had breakfast in the park, and again that night as we stood in the hallway but I’d been too scared of where that might lead so I stupidly started ‘the routine’ on her instead.

Her chestnut-brown eyes, with their large, black pupils, are
closed and untouched and they are my most favourite part of her. So much of what she’s about to say begins in her eyes. And I carry the scars of the look in those eyes when I went to see her after we first had sex. She hid her gaze from me until she made me confirm that I regularly seduced and fucked women in my hall – then her eyes had exploded with an agony that had pierced my heart. I thought I’d felt every kind of pain there was to feel three years before, but in that unguarded moment she taught me different.

Her forehead – the place I’d kissed her after sex – is mostly untouched.

Every part of her face, damaged or not, is perfect, a reminder of the process – the heady, exhilarating, gut-wrenching, humbling process – of falling in love with her.