Not Without You (47 page)

Sara brushes something imaginary away from her cheek. ‘Oh … wow.’ She looks down at the floor. ‘Well … yeah. I was really into him. You just – you never realised, you didn’t see the effect you had on people. You just waltzed in with your accent and your “I don’t care, I’ve got nothing to lose” and it was so weird to me. So weird when that’s all I’ve ever wanted. I suppose …’

I interrupt. ‘I’m sorry. That’s the thing – when you get your own way all the time you start to think you can’t be wrong about anything. Well, you’ve done a lot of stuff wrong. But so have I. When we’re both back in LA I’m going to arrange for you to see someone. Someone who can help you. I’ll help you get an agent but … you need to see a professional therapist. And then I reckon it kind of cancels out. Just … stop it. OK?’

I haven’t thought this through. I don’t know what she’ll say. I bend down and unfasten the straps on my shoes, buying her some time. I can hear her breathing, rapid, shallow. I look up again and think,
She does look like me.
I smile.

‘What’s funny?’ she says, almost impatiently.

‘We – us. You look like me,’ I say. ‘It’s true, everyone always said it. But you do.’

In her eyes, I was the lucky one, she wasn’t. I had a pushy, nightmarish mother who got me here. She didn’t. So I don’t blame Sara, I tell myself. I blame the system that spat her out and made her like this.

‘What do you think?’ I ask her.

‘OK.’ She says this after a moment. It feels like hours. ‘OK. Wow. Yeah. OK.’

The door bangs open again and Artie claps his hands. ‘Sorry, ladies,’ he calls. ‘Sophie, my apologies. Patrick’s on his way. He wants to say hi—’

He trails off, as he realises Sara and I are still facing each other.

‘Girls, what’s this about?’ Artie holds out his hands. ‘Is Sara causing you problems? Is—’

I wave him away, pick up my iPad and hug it to me, then turn to Sara again. ‘Nothing. I’m going to have a bath. We’re OK here, aren’t we, Sara.’

She nods slowly. ‘We are.’

‘Great.’ He isn’t interested. ‘So, Sophie. Hey. Where do we go now?’ He chews his lip. ‘Honey, honey. Let’s say – I’ll catch up with you later. There’s a lot of people want a little bit of Sophie! We got game, we got fuckin’ game, let’s use it, OK? We’ll talk later.’

I nod, and he kisses me on the cheek.

‘I’m going down,’ says Sara. ‘I’ll come with you.’

Artie gives her a non-committal grunt.

‘So, bye then,’ she says to me. She shoots me one last look as they leave.

‘Bye, Sara,’ I say. The door opens and I catch sight of the two big guys outside, black suits, sitting on black chairs, either side of the door before it closes again and I am all alone.

It’s only then I realise I am dead, dead tired. Fatigue washes suddenly over me and I can barely stand. I lie down on the blessedly cool, smooth, cotton duvet cover, roll onto my side and stare out of the window at the park. A helicopter flies over the trees in the distance. There’s the faintest sound of car horns and traffic. I hear one of the security guards chatting to the other, then nothing. I close my eyes and sleep, for how long I don’t know.

When I wake up it’s night. The lights of London are red and white outside and it’s dark in my room. It’s very quiet; I can’t hear anyone in the corridor. I’m the only person on this floor. I wonder what Sara’s doing. I check my phone. It’s ten-thirty p.m. Rubbing my eyes, still half asleep, I wander into the bathroom – coral, grey and gold, like a Moroccan riad. Hot-pink peonies everywhere. I’m going to have a bath. Yes, that’s it. A long, hot bath, and an early night. And maybe, just maybe, I’ll sleep now. I’m getting one of the guards from outside to stay in my room though, just to be sure.

There’s a huge bottle of Jo Malone grapefruit bath oil on the side and I pour it in, breathing in the citrus tang as it roils around the steam. The mirror fogs over, the water rushes. As I lean forward to inhale the sweetly sour fumes my head spins; I’m still knackered. It’s been a long day. This time yesterday I was getting ready for the night shoot. I hadn’t slept with Alec. I hadn’t seen Eve again. Nothing really had happened.

I wonder how Eve and Rose are, in their cold damp house. I wonder if today is a watershed for them, as it hopefully is for me. I need to tell the police I think it’s all over. Should I do that? How do I do it? My tired brain keeps short-circuiting.
Get some sleep and think about it tomorrow.

Instead I’ll do something constructive. I make up my mind to call Don Matthews. I’ll get hold of his number and tell him to come over and see her. Tell him she wants to see him. She’s just afraid, and she doesn’t realise she’s got nothing to be afraid of … nothing at all. I take out the phone number I’d asked Sara to get for me and dial it.

There’s a long, long connecting crackle, about thirty seconds, and for a while I think it’s just not going to go through, that the number’s wrong, and then it rings, for ages, and again I think, no. Oh, dear. They’re not at home.

But suddenly a voice answers. ‘Hello? Who is this?’

I walk backwards and forwards. The connection in the echoing bathroom, with the sound of water roaring around me, is rubbish. ‘Hello?’ I call. ‘Hello!’

‘Yes. I can hear you. Who is it?’ It’s a thin, dry voice, slightly quavering.

‘My name’s Sophie,’ I say. I think I hear a sound behind me and I whirl around; it’s nothing. I clear my throat. ‘Is that Don? Don Matthews?’

‘Yes,’ says Don Matthews, though he sounds uncertain. ‘I’m having a nap. I’m extremely old, you know. What do you want, dear?’

‘Oh gosh. I’m so sorry … I’m calling from England …’

‘Right. Well, give me your cell, and I’ll make sure and call you when you’re fast asleep.’

I laugh, I can’t help it, his tone is funny. I turn into a corner, away from the bath, and unzip my dress.

‘I’m sorry to bother you. It’s just I wanted to talk to you. It’s important. About Eve Noel,’ I say.

There’s a silence. ‘What?’

‘Well, I saw her today,’ I say. ‘She told me – about you.’

‘Who are you?’ he says, sounding cross and old at the same time. ‘Why are you ringing?’

‘Listen,’ I say. ‘I’m not trying to do anything. I just wanted to tell you not to listen to her. You have to see her when you’re over. She—’

The water is roaring loud and so I don’t hear her coming in.

Don’t hear the door close.

The blow comes from behind, and the phone drops to the floor, smashing into pieces. I fall, slipping on the marble, my knee tearing and burning. She stands over me, as I look up at her, and she’s laughing.

‘You stupid, stupid bitch,’ she says. ‘Did you really think that’d be it? Do you seriously, honestly, think you’ve forgiven me and that’s it?’

She stamps on my face, and I scream. I hear a crunching sound and I can’t see anything. I scream again. The pain is unbelievably, elementally bad. I curl into a ball, but she stamps on me again, my face, my shoulder, and she’s laughing as she kicks me against the bath, like you’d kick a rag doll. She is very strong.

‘Guess we won’t look similar any more after this,’ Sara says, laughing, and before I can find the strength to reach out and catch her leg with my other arm she raises her foot above me one more time, and brings it down, and everything goes black.

accept one’s fate

OUR ROUTINE WAS basic, and tedious. Get up. Breakfast, two cups of tea for me, coffee for Rose. Clean and do household chores – in a desultory fashion, it must be said. Read a little. Have some lunch. Then a nap. Rose would go for a walk, or to do the shopping, if needed. I would write to Don. Have some more tea. At 6 p.m. every day Rose had a bath, while I listened to the news and made our supper, then we ate supper, read some more or watched television if there was a film Don had recommended, and so to bed. I slept a lot. I read a lot. And most of all I wrote things down, about my life then. Or I wrote my faxes to Don, who was my life now. On the rare occasions I had to venture into the village or to town, I’d go in the morning, rather than the afternoon, because there were fewer people around. Once in a while one of us would attend church. That was the only variation to my routine. The biggest dramas of my life of late were the visits from those film people, and my ear infection, which required a trip to the doctor’s. I hadn’t been for ten years and though I wanted Rose to come with me, of course she couldn’t. It took me a week to get over it. People – waiting rooms – the pain in my ear – a doctor asking me questions I didn’t want to answer – until I realised she didn’t care that much, only wanted a solution to the problem so she could move on and treat the next patient.

Two days after Sophie Leigh had been to see me, I was standing in the kitchen, opening a tin of soup for lunch and thinking about Don, as I always did. I’d told him about Sophie’s visit, just as I’d told him about the girl who’d arrived on the doorstep the week before. He was quite strange about it, wanted to know what they both looked like, and then at the bottom of his fax he’d written:

You see, it was that that was making me so nervous. I hadn’t asked for Sophie to barge her way in here with her strangely direct questions, but she’d come and now she was gone, and in a curious way her coming meant I hadn’t had any choice in the matter. This, this question of seeing Don, it was my choice, my decision. I didn’t want to see him – oh, I did, more than anything, you must understand me – but at the same time, I knew, I
knew
, that if I did it would be the end of everything. Letters are words, they can persuade you of anything. Actions are what have hurt me, all through my life.

So until I turned on the radio that Friday morning, I’m afraid I assumed that this drama was really all about me.

The can buckled as it landed on the ground; lumps of glutinous potato, sand-coloured blobs on the cracked linoleum. I looked down in a daze and stepped over them, to turn up the volume.

‘Rose!’ I shouted. ‘
Rose!
’

They went over to a juvenile-sounding reporter who had some rubbish about the ‘Hercule Poirot nature of the crime’ – and I stood there, staring at the kitchen floor without really looking at it. My first thought was,
I’m not going to ring them.
I could easily just not have heard the whole thing.

Then I thought of Sophie’s beautiful face, rather bolshie and so funny when she wanted to be, how kind she’d been, how confused she seemed. I was surprised to find myself clutching the table; I found I couldn’t bear the idea of her in pain.

‘Rose!’ I called again, and as I did I thought again of that girl who’d come to see us the week before Sophie came back, with the mad, raving eyes that searched over my shoulder, peering into the house.
‘My dad started out at the clinic where they took you,’ she’d said. ‘You hate white roses, don’t you?’
The clinic I was taken to after I lost the baby. Where they shocked me. Who was she? She wasn’t Sophie, I knew that much, but … what could I do? Perhaps it had nothing to do with anything, I told myself. If I rang the police, what would they say? How would I be helping? After all, my involvement with this world today is minimal, and I thought that I preferred to keep it that way.

You gave her your letters to Don, you gave her your pages about what happened to you. You trusted her, she trusted you. She needs you. Why did you do it if you didn’t want her in your life?

I don’t know why.
I don’t know why.
I mopped up the soup, crossly, and opened the cupboard to take another tin out.

And I looked at the cans, lined up so neatly. Ten a week, half a tin each per lunch, our lives stretching out in front of us in cans. Tomato, potato, Scotch broth soups. I thought about that girl who was so like Sophie and yet never could be. Her eyes, staring at me. ‘
I hate them too.
’

‘What’s wrong, Eve dear?’ Rose said, appearing in the doorway.

‘Sophie,’ I said. ‘Sophie Leigh. Someone’s attacked her. They don’t really say how she is.’

‘What?’ Rose stood stock still. ‘Why?’

‘I think I know why,’ I said. ‘I think I need to go to the police. Will you come with me?’

Rose rocked back on her feet and her face grew pinched. The way it used to. When she trusted no one, because she’d been lied to and cheated on so many times. Anyone in authority terrified her. For years after I found her, she had nightmares about the police finding her and taking her away.

I realised then in that moment that perhaps, in many ways, I was the stronger one. Perhaps I always had been. Rose flew out first, and her wings melted in the sun and she fell to earth. I had followed, cautiously, and carried her up in my arms.

So I took a deep breath. ‘It’s all right. You hold the fort here,’ I said, and we looked at each other and smiled. I walked down the corridor to the hall, where hung my summer mackintosh. ‘I think I might see if the car wants to work, just this once, and take me to the train station,’ I said. ‘I think I ought to go to London.’

Rose followed me through and out of the door. ‘Good for you, darling.’

But the car wouldn’t start. I hadn’t driven it for a long time, and I knew it was leaking something rusty, from the bottom. I sat in the car, thinking. If I rang, who would I call? I didn’t know who to speak to. I’d spent so long cutting myself off I’d become really very good at it. And after all, what use would I be to Sophie, I asked myself. Some eccentric old biddy turning up talking rubbish about murderous assistants with crazy eyes. No, better to accept one’s fate and stay here with my little slice of life: the soup and the mice, the rest of the letters and faxes from Don and the memories, and dream about what might have been. I could spare those letters – I had enough. And she didn’t need me. She had lots of people who’d help her. I went inside, ignoring Rose’s expression, and closed the door.