“What’s the matter?” She grabbed his arm and he shook free.
“This isn’t about you.”
“You’re in my house!”
The thunder of Henry, crashing and stumbling down the stairs. Gil flew at him, his fist connecting hard with Henry’s nose, sending him staggering back against the wall then rebounding to lunge at Gil’s face.
“Stop it!” Cecily shrieked. Gil had the advantage of speed and rage but Henry’s weight lent him force. Blows fell. Blood was streaming from Henry’s nose, trickled from Gil’s cheek. Gil swung for Henry’s jaw, catching him off-balance again. Henry toppled against the counter, knocking the radio into the scone mixture before slumping heavily to the floor. Gil stood above him, panting hard.
“Will you stop, now?” She was almost in tears, torn between them. “What’s the matter with the pair of you?”
Henry struggled to sit, eyeing Gil with wary anger. “I’m just defending myself.” He was sulky, like a small boy after a playground spat. The savagery in Gil’s face hadn’t waned.
“Do you want to tell her?”
“Nothing to tell.”
Gil stared at him. “He sold me to the press.”
“She didn’t pay me.”
“Not that kind of selling.”
Cecily looked from one to the other, filling in the blanks, appalled. She said, “You did what?”
Henry hauled himself onto a chair. “It was Eve Callaghan not the fucking red-tops.”
“Even so.” Gil’s voice held no less steel.
“And she’s not stupid, you know. She knows who everyone is in this town. She’s probably been watching you in Patrick’s for years – ”
“I’m hardly in Patrick’s any more - ”
“ – shagging anything that moves.”
“I don’t do that now.”
Cecily said, “Thanks Henry.”
“Shit. I didn’t mean – ”
“I think you should go.”
He gaped at her. “He attacked me.”
“Sounds as if you attacked him first.”
“Oh I might have known whose side – ”
“Shut up!” she cried. “It was horrible, witnessing that just now. Apparently I can’t talk to you both about it at the same time. And I have a café to open in – oh, look, less than an hour. Just go.”
He began to say something, changed his mind. The door to the yard shut smartly behind him. Gil, leaning against the sink now, said, “I’m sorry.”
“Does your hand hurt?”
“Yeah. Haven’t hit anyone for years.”
“Sit down.”
She fetched her first aid kit, tended to his cheek and bloodied knuckles. “You might have a black eye later.”
He caught her wrist. “I am sorry. I shouldn’t have involved you.”
“Oh Gil, I am involved. He did it because of me, because he’s jealous of you. Of us. What did he say to Eve Callaghan, exactly?”
“Told her tales of my sordid past. She now thinks I’m a shallow, untrustworthy bastard and should have my cock amputated as a warning to all other shallow, untrustworthy bastards.”
“Is she going to print that?”
“Fuck knows. Who’d care?”
“Well … Gem.”
He groaned. “Oh Jesus. And that’s not all. I mean, obviously being shat on by Henry is bad enough, but because of it Eve told me something – implied something – that … ” He stopped. “I can’t. Can’t tell you. Can’t tell her. Keeping a secret’s a kind of betrayal though, isn’t it.”
She gazed at him. He looked awful, she thought. Upset. Beaten. She said softly, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“No.” He shook his head. “This just gets worse. And it isn’t even my grief.”
“But you’ve taken it on.” She smiled wryly. “You don’t look as if it isn’t your grief.”
He touched the already swelling wound beneath his eye and winced. “What will you do about Henry?”
“I don’t know.” The thought of being in the same room as him chilled her yet she couldn’t precisely identify her reaction. Disappointed? Shocked? Disgusted? Not even remotely surprised? She said, “Just at the moment I’m finding it hard to come up with the right words.”
Jem gazed at him across the kitchen table. “Okay. Can I ask questions?”
“Sure.” He had told her the truth – almost all of the truth – enough of the truth – and she had listened in silence. He was knackered and his face hurt and trying to skirt around the implications of Eve’s words had required more dexterity than he felt he possessed just now. But maybe he’d misinterpreted. For what had Eve said, exactly? That she felt guilty. That Marianne had been her friend and that Alex was an attractive man. Where else was he supposed to go with that? She must have known what conclusion he would draw. Then again, quite possibly he was too exhausted and too fraught to see anything but the most traumatic explanation. Because seriously, Alex and Eve? Alex and Eve? It didn’t square with the man Jem described to him – but then he was her father. It didn’t square with his own construction of Alex – but then he’d hardly known him. And what about me? he thought. Would someone knowing me as I am with Jem be shocked to learn of the man I was? Still am? Aren’t we all more complex and less predictable than we think?
Jem said, “So Henry is the guy we met on the prom.”
“Yes.” He was almost relieved. Questions about Henry he could deal with.
“And when did you last sleep with this woman?”
“Cecily. She’s called Cecily. I don’t know. A year ago.”
“A year ago? And Henry can’t handle that?”
“Apparently not.”
“But you’re just friends now.”
“Yes.”
“Right.” She nodded. “What did he think Eve was going to do? Write an exposé in the local paper?”
“I guess. ‘Pier Hero Sex Addict Unmasked’.”
“But that’s why he did it. He wasn’t to know that Eve was a friend of my parents and would never publish anything that’d hurt me. He thought it’d mean you’d have to come clean to me and it’d wreck what we have. Like he thinks you’re capable of wrecking what he and Cecily have. And that’s why you hit him.”
She was right. He hadn’t fully grasped any of that himself, but she was right. “Yeah. That maybe wasn’t such a good idea. I was just so fucking angry with him. I completely lost it. The whole red mist thing. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. He deserved it. You trusted him and when someone you trust lets you down it’s a terrible, painful thing. It shouldn’t be underestimated. And for the record? I don’t care what you have been to other people. I just care what you are to me.”
He was moved, briefly, beyond words.
She gazed at him. “Your poor face.” Thought about it. “Actually you know, it’s quite sexy.”
He laughed. Painfully. “Great.”
She kissed his bruised knuckles, his temple. “It’s strange about Eve. She was Mum’s friend, she obviously cared enough to read you the riot act, yet I hardly remember her being around after Mum died. Maybe I should talk to her.”
He hesitated. “I don’t know. What is there to say?”
“I could reassure her she needn’t worry about me because you’re doing a fantastic job.”
“Am I?” He remembered getting drunk with Cecily in Patrick’s, sitting in her kitchen with his head in his hands. The truth was, Eve had a point.
“Come on,” she said. “I need to shake myself free of all this. Let’s go out.”
“Sure you want to be seen with me looking like I went ten rounds with Amir Khan?”
“Ten?”
“One.” He smiled. She smiled too.
“We could wait until it’s dark,” she said.
Cecily was sitting on her sofa, her laptop open at an Expedia search for winter flights to Spain, when her mobile buzzed. She frowned at it as it jiggled across the table. HENRY, it said
. She ignored it. A moment later her landline chirruped. She ignored that too, as she compared costs and dates and timings. Escaping the intense and tangled world in which she appeared to be living had suddenly become a pressing need.
Five minutes later the pounding on the kitchen door was so hard it was vibrating into the attic. Setting her laptop aside she went downstairs and threw back the bolt, turned the key. Henry stared at her. “You weren’t answering your phone.”
She folded her arms. “No.”
He took a step into the room, closed the door behind him. She didn’t move, effectively barring his progress. He looked pathetic, in all senses. Swollen nose. Self-pitying expression. “I just want to talk to you.”
“I’ve nothing to say to you. And there’s nothing you can say that I want to hear.”
“Not even that I’m sorry?”
She sighed. “Sometimes ‘sorry’ doesn’t cut it, Henry. Sometimes what you’ve done is too big for ‘sorry’ even to come close.”
He shifted, uncomfortably. Usually by now she was pouring him a glass of wine and feeding him leftovers. She could tell he was thinking that if he managed to hit upon the right words in the right order that might still happen.
“I didn’t think - ”
“No.” Her gaze was cold. “You didn’t. And before you say his name with your usual contempt, this isn’t about Gil. I’d feel the same if you’d betrayed Radar, or Buz, or me. Oh no, wait a minute, it was me, wasn’t it, by association. Because if you’re going to drag Gil through the mud, you’re dragging me too.”
He said, “You’re not remotely interested in listening to my side of the story.”
The thoughts which had been fermenting in her head all day were a trip switch away from spewing out of her and souring everything. Which presumed everything hadn’t been soured already. She said, “You should go home. We could both do with some distance from this. Some sleep. I only opened the door to you just now to stop you waking up the whole square.”
“No. That’s not fair. You sent me away before and I went. I’m not going again.”
She looked at him, standing there trying to be reasonable whilst tipping towards belligerence. Perhaps detailing precisely how she felt wouldn’t sour everything. Perhaps it would bring him to his senses. “All right. If you really want to have this conversation.” She indicated a stool. “Sit there.” He obeyed. She picked up the bottle of scotch she’d last opened for Gil and poured them both a shot. “I can’t see,” she began, “that you have a side of the story. And you know, this is what I find so disturbing about what you did. Because what has Gil ever done to you?” She gave him a second or two to reply, forged on. “Nothing. He’s always just been himself. And then yesterday he turned to me when he was stressed. He hadn’t wronged you, or insulted you. And for reasons entirely of your own, you decided to make him look cheap.”
“She already knew,” Henry said heavily. “Eve. She’d noticed him around Patrick’s for years, she’d seen what sort of man he is.”
“So you betrayed him for nothing.”
“I just filled in some of the details.”
“Oh great.” She shook her head. “How can any of us ever trust you again?”
He looked appalled. “I’d never do that to you.”
“But how do I know that? What if I really pissed you off, would you go spilling my secrets to someone? What if I did something worse than that, what would you do to me then?”
“Cecily, no.” He reached towards her and she drew back. “I’d never hurt you. I’ve never hurt anyone. It’s just him. I’d had enough, I … reacted badly. He did respond by doing this to my face.”
“Oh that’s right, you didn’t fight back. It really disturbs me, Henry. I understand that when he was sleeping around everything was fine because you could be morally superior. But now he’s not doing that any more you don’t even have that over him. That’s why you threw it in Eve’s lap. It was all the ammunition you had.” He was nodding slowly. Sorrowfully. She pressed on. “But jealousy can create a self-fulfilling prophecy. And it kind of has.”
He stared at her. “What do you mean?”
“I can’t keep doing this. Everytime you go off in a sulk because of Gil I have a little less respect for you. Everytime I find I’m a little less willing to talk you round.”
“But this is an end to it, this time.”
She said, with genuine regret, “I think it might be an end to something else.”
His jaw sagged. “Are you saying this is over?”
She was on the brink of pointing out that ‘this’ had been a few months’ sex, not a ten year marriage. She didn’t say it because one of the realisations crowding her mind all day was that Gil had been right. He had understood back at the beginning that if she embarked upon a relationship with Henry it would mean far more to him than it would to her. He had said as much, and she had been furious with him. I didn’t listen, she thought. I didn’t want to hear him being right, because I was caught up in my own pain, and annoyed with him for leering at other girls on the beach. I was jealous too.
“Henry, I’m sorry.” She saw dismay in his eyes and was smitten with guilt twice over, that she didn’t care for him enough to accept and forgive him for what he had done and move on from it, and that she was using it as an excuse. She was being dishonest. But then I’ve been dishonest from the beginning, she thought. And maybe now it’s just time to stop.
Chapter Twenty-seven
We have an hour to spare at the station in Milan. It’s a beautiful place, vast vaulted roof, stone sculptures, but Gil rushes us along the platform as if through a crack den. I lift my arm out of his grasp and he looks at me, exasperated. “What?”
“Why are you in such a hurry?”
“Well fine, you admire the scenery. I need a drink.”
I let him go, watch him heading into the bar as I slow my pace, craning my neck to the steel arcs and coloured glass of the roof, the great stone staircases leading to the ticket hall, long red scrolls attached to pillars advertising some sort of festival. I tell myself how lovely it is, how interesting, but I’m only pretending. My heart is fluttering as it always does when he’s out of sight and I can’t quite catch my breath. The flow of our fellow passengers from the Ventimiglia train has ebbed now and I am one of a half dozen people remaining on the platform. There are thousands, millions, of places in the world I could be. Who would know, who would guess, I would be here?
My phone buzzes. “Sorry,” Gil says.
“It’s okay.”
“It isn’t. But I bought you a drink.”
“What is it?” I begin to walk up the stairs and across the ticket hall towards the bar, fifty, maybe sixty yards away.
“I thought I’d ordered brandy and soda but Jesus, it could be anything.”
I laugh. It’s in my head to say, “Your Italian’s up there with your French then, is it?” but it’s then that I see him.
He’s just a flicker in my peripheral vision, but my body reacts before my brain has chance to register what it’s seen, my stomach twisting, nausea rising into my throat. I speed up, clammy with sweat.
And of course when I look back, over my shoulder, almost losing my balance and falling to the glittering concourse, he isn’t there.
He’s in front of me.
I cry out but he grabs me, moves me aside fast. He’s just the same, blond, paunchy, cargo shorts, polo shirt. Except his face is a mess. Bruised and bloodied. I can hear my heart.
“Where is he?” he demands.
“I don’t … he isn’t … ” I can barely speak.
He shakes me, hard. I wonder can nobody see this, doesn’t it look to anyone like an assault? “Is he with you?”
“No.”
“So he’s dumped you?” He stares at me, trying to read the truth in my eyes. “Left you on your own? Yeah, well he always was a bastard.”
“Let go of me,” I hiss, “or I will start screaming.” I’m thinking of a knee to the groin, b
ut he’s big, Henry. Bigger than Gil. He could do me damage in an instant.
“Let you go?” His face darkens, his meaty hand tightening around my arm. “Have you any idea how long or how much fucking trouble it’s taken to track you down?”
So I do it. My kneecap to his scrotum. As hard as I can. He shouts and as he’s doubling over in pain releases me so abruptly I jerk away from him and spin, sprinting through the crowd, knocking against bags, suitcases, small children. Inside the bar I draw up short, panting. Gil’s there, at a window table, visible to anyone.
“I used to think,” he greets me, “that I knew what it was to need a drink. Now I know that was just wanting one. Shit. What? What’s happened?”
I heave on his name.
He storms out to the ticket hall. I knock back the brandy and soda and follow. We aren’t doing a very good job of not drawing attention to ourselves. And of course Henry has gone. Gil whirls back to me. “Where was he?”
I show him.
“Fuck.” He marches the length and breadth of the concourse, as if the fury of God were in him. I wait out of the way, leaning against the wall so no one can come up behind me, clamp their hand over my mouth, drag me away. After a few minutes Gil returns, still scowling. “Nothing.”
“You didn’t expect him to hang around?”
“It’s what he wants, isn’t it? To find us?” He looks at me. “Are you all right? Did he hurt you?”
“No. He didn’t get the chance. I kneed him in the balls.”
He looks at me. “You did what?”
I tell him, and he laughs in disbelief, and kind of in admiration. “You see now why we have to stay together?”
I nod.
“I’ll be better at this. I will.”
“Gil.” I hesitate. “He looked like he’d been beaten up.”
“Well.” He takes a breath and I realise at this point that there isn’t a mark on him. “It’d be no more than he deserves.”
Chapter Twenty-eight
For the first time since her father’s death, Jem stood in a space he had owned and experienced it in the present tense. She gazed upon peeling walls with damp corners and surface of uneven whitewashed stone, at the floor sporadically littered with scraps of paper and curled paint tubes, at the mdf boards nailed to the window frames. Those need to be taken down, she thought. It’s time.