The Last Time I Saw You (23 page)
Sally drove us all the way down to Norwich, even though I’d rather have taken the train. She drove like she was in a computer game, zooming up behind cars to force them to move over, and violently slamming on the brakes at the sight of a speed camera. I wasn’t a driver yet, but I knew it was a far cry from my dad’s painstaking signaling and ponderous crawl.
It added to my unvoiced sense of unease about the trip. I still hadn’t contacted James myself, and yet the two of them had been in touch. Sally was thrilled at her own cleverness, casting herself as the UN peacekeeping force, but I felt intruded on. I tried gently to say as much, but she blasted me out of the water. “You’d have sent him a billet-doux from your nursing home if I hadn’t stuck my oar in. You need to get out of that clever head of yours and live a little!”
She was right about that, no question, so I squashed my doubts into my backpack and hoped for the best. Besides, it
was good to have an excuse to get away. Lola had been added to the roll call of people who weren’t speaking to me—she mainly stayed at Justin’s but the couple of times I did run into her, her look of betrayal made me feel like an insect. When I told Sally how bad I felt she agreed. “We’ll make it up to her,” she said, but to me it felt like we’d broken something that was too delicate to be repaired.
We got to James’s digs about eight o’clock, my heart speeding in my chest like it might make a bid for freedom, my palms cold and damp. She hugged him first, then looked back at me as if she were encouraging her toddler to step into the nursery rhyme circle.
“Hi,” I said uncertainly, submitting myself to a hug. He gave it freely, putting his whole self into it, and I allowed myself to relax. Maybe this would be okay.
“I’ve got big plans for us, girls,” he said, rubbing his hands together like an evil genius, and I realized that I was as in love with him as I’d ever been, only now I’d taken aim and missed the target. Was it worse to be here—so near and yet so far—or to not have him in my life at all? I didn’t know yet.
We went to a student club, the kind of place that Sally would usually have turned her button nose up at: tonight she seemed perfectly happy to throw herself into the sweaty vortex. We drank copious vodkas and multiple shots, dancing to Happy Mondays like it was our last night on earth. Sally had that wild brightness about her that sometimes came upon her, like the moment after a firecracker’s been lit and you know you need to jump back. James couldn’t help but react to it—to ask him not to would be like asking a bird not to fly—and I tried my hardest not to mind the way he looked at her. At least he was back by my side, within touching distance, and I knew she would never dream of doing anything. She
was just being herself, the self I adored, and any trace of jealousy was a sickness I had to eradicate.
I was pretending to be happy, self-medicating with shots, even though I knew I didn’t have Sally’s iron constitution. Fatal mistake: I threw up outside the club at chucking out time, and the three of us piled into a cab, me desperately hoping that James couldn’t smell it on me, that it wouldn’t compound his lack of desire. Sally fussed over me when we got back, putting me to bed in a room that one of James’s roommates had vacated, and helping me wash my hair to ensure there were no rogue traces. I felt cosseted by her, and fell into a fitful, muzzy sleep.
There were streaks of blue in the sky when she climbed into bed beside me.
“Sorry,” she whispered, “go back to sleep. You need your rest.”
“What time is it?”
“Late. We just got chatting.”
I felt a prickly feeling inside myself, sleep suddenly a distant memory.
“About what?”
“Oh, stuff,” said Sally, her voice thick and heavy like she was almost unconscious.
Was she? Maybe she was: her breathing certainly implied it. As for me, no chance, I just lay there, trying to get my heartbeat to return to a normal pace, my imagination staging a riot.
There was an ease about them the next day—they no longer needed me as a conduit, they had an intimacy all of their own. I convinced myself that my fears had been nothing but the kind of paranoia that strikes in the wee small hours, but I was still discomfited by the subtle change of tide: a triangle
was a dangerous toy to put in Sally’s eager hands. James suggested a country walk—he’s always loved anything vaguely sporty or outdoorsy—and Sally readily agreed, even though I’d barely ever seen her out of a pair of high heels. As we trailed behind him up a hill, she linked her arm in mine.
“You feeling better? You look a million times better than you did last night.”
“Yes, much better thanks.”
“You having fun?”
Sort of was the honest answer, but truth was a commodity I’d learned to sacrifice in favor of peace.
“Yeah, totally.”
“Good! She looks better, doesn’t she, James?”
“Man, you were green. You were like, bile colored.”
He made a face, and I laughed, and felt an intense rush of gratitude for the fact that normal service had finally been resumed. He was pink from the wind, his blue eyes twinkly and warm, and I tried not to let the longing unseat me. I could do this, I always had, I’d just have to relearn the steps.
By the time the weekend was over I genuinely thought I’d enjoyed it.
“Goodbye, You,” said Sally, flinging her arms around him theatrically.
“Bye,” he said affectionately, hugging her back.
“You’ll have to come stay in our lush new pad,” she added, without a trace of guilt about how it had come about. Then it was my turn to hug him.
“It was lovely to see you,” I told him, hoping my voice wasn’t soaked through with too much feeling, like a Christmas pudding doused in brandy.
“Yeah, you too,” he said, our gaze meeting for a second, a silent acknowledgment of what had kept us apart.
“Come on, the traffic’s shit on Sundays,” said Sally, impatiently tossing her keys between her manicured hands, the nails red talons.
Once we were on the road she put Beverley Craven on full blast.
“Say thank you to your Auntie Sally,” she said, grinning at me.
“Thank you, Auntie Sally,” I parroted, trying to squash down the uncomfortable feelings that were threatening to bubble to the surface. She laughed, high with it all, then stamped down on the accelerator so sharply that a truck swerved to avoid us, leaning on his horn in outrage.
“Sally would have loved it here,” says Lola, already welling up.
We’ve met in a French wine bar behind Oxford Circus that’s a particular favorite of mine. It’s quite low-key, despite the location, the only light coming from the stumpy candles that are allowed to melt over the tightly packed wooden tables, the wine served in basic glass beakers. There’s not a martini to be had for love nor money: I can guarantee Sally would have hated it.
“I know,” I say, squeezing her hand. I’m lying already and we’ve only been here five minutes. It is a white lie, at least, born out of my determination that we don’t get dragged back into the savage triangle that defined our years at Leeds. Already the two of us together without Sally feels totally weird.
“Look at you,” says Lola, smiling a tear-sodden smile. “You’ve got a real glow, Livvy.”
“Have I?” I say, guiltily. I know logically that William and I is pointless and hopeless, but I’m seeing him on Sunday,
and I haven’t been able to smother a tiny spark of excitement that burns away unbidden. At least, not until now. Lola looks careworn, dark circles ringing her eyes, her concealer applied so thickly that it only serves to draw attention to them—she radiates sadness like the candle between us radiates light. “You look well too,” I say, because to say the opposite would be cruel.
“Still can’t believe it,” she says. “I keep expecting my cell to ring, and it to be Sally calling me from Saks, or some other stupidly glamorous place, while I’m doing a three-point turn in the Guildford Tesco.”
“I know,” I say. I don’t know that exactly, but what I do know is how it feels to wait for a call from Sally that will never come. How stupid I was, the way I always thought that there’d be more time. But then, even if I had pushed, would I really and truly have wanted her back?
“Mesdemoiselles, are you ready to order?” says the dark-haired smoothie of a waiter, approaching us with his pad in hand. We’re mesdames really, but it feels delicious to be flirted with. We order a bottle of warming red, accompanied by some stinky cheese, and settle into our corner. I feel very sentimental all of a sudden, tears pricking behind my eyeballs, the years concertinaing back to the time when we really were mesdemoiselles. I should have fought harder for my friendship with Lola, made good the damage I did, and established a relationship that wasn’t about Sally anymore.
“It’s lovely to see you,” I say, clinking my glass against hers. “I’m still—Lola, I’m sorry for the way I behaved back then. It was so selfish . . .”
A flash of anger crosses her face, a tiny sign that the hurts of the past still exert a grip on her too, but then she forces her expression back to neutral. Is it simply human nature
that the deepest cuts must leave a scar, or are our wounds more raw because of the intensity that Sally brought to everything?
“I can’t stop thinking about William,” she says, sidestepping everything I said like it’s a dirty puddle. “You know he’s moved back here?”
“Yes, yes I did know that,” I say, my voice sounding high and artificial.
“I called a couple of times, but I didn’t hear back. But now . . .” She looks at me, embarrassed, and a tiny, awful part of me feels smug that for once I’m not out in the cold. “He’s getting Madeline christened next month.”
“Yes, I know. I’m actually going.”
“Great! That’s great,” she says, trying and failing not to sound surprised. Should I tell her I’m going to be godmother, or will it just draw us into territory too murky to risk? “Have you spoken to him at all?”
I look at her, trying to formulate a response, the words choking in my throat.
“Yeah, I have. He wanted to meet, actually.” Why do I keep saying actually? “To talk about back then. You know, what I remembered about . . . about Sally.”
“Oh. Right.”
“He’s a nice man, isn’t he? I’m glad she did so well.”
“I think he thinks
he
did pretty well,” says Lola, quick as a flash.
“Yeah, no, I didn’t mean it like that. I just meant that he’s a nice man. You must have got to know him properly with all those trips to New York.”
“I only went a few times.” Everything we say to each other seems to land as though it’s barbed, even when it’s not intended that way. I wish we could just clear away the
silt and start again, the waters clear. But what I’ve done—I’ve lost even the possibility. “But yeah, they were great together.”
“Were they?” I say, sadness seeping through me. I need to hear this, need to keep remembering that William could never be mine, not truly.
“I mean I’m lucky if Justin gets me a bunch of daffodils on Valentine’s Day!” says Lola, her own infatuation with Sally shining through her open face. She never took her off the pedestal, I can see that. “I remember the last time I went to see them, they had this thing that he had to get her a proper present when he went away for work, not like duty-free chocolates or perfume. So he’d been to Milan, and he’d spent the whole of the last day literally walking the streets, looking for the perfect thing. He had to beg them to let him on the flight.”
“What did he get her?” I ask, trying to sound wistfully curious, to not let her see how ravenous I am for details that I know will hurt me. But it’s not just about William, I want to know who she became: if I know who she became, perhaps I’ll know why she left.
“It was this beautiful handmade photograph album. I think he slipped a picture of Madeline into it before he gave it to her.” Lola looks across at me, eyes bright. “It was so romantic.”
“Did she like it?” I say, feeling a little queasy, like I’m some kind of hustler playing a confidence trick.
“Yeah, of course she did.”
It would have been a matter of weeks before she died. William still pushing himself to the absolute edge to try and win her approval. Did she love him for it, or despise him like he so often seemed to fear?
“And they were happy?”
“Yes, Livvy, she was happy! She had a lovely life. What’s your point?”
“It’s just . . . you know what she was like. She liked to keep them on their toes, didn’t she?”
Lola gives an angry little shrug.
“Did she? We were kids, Livvy, it’s a long time ago. She was a wife and mother. She’d grown up.”
Just for a second I wish with all my heart that Sally was here. She’d get the gray areas—that you can have a lovely life on paper and still be unhappy, that being a wife and mother might not change your essential nature. She could always see through people and situations like a hot knife slicing through butter, it was what allowed her to keep pulling the strings. I lost my naivety to Sally, but perhaps some of it needed to go, for my very survival. She taught me truths about human nature with those sly, perceptive little observations of hers. I don’t think she’d want to be airbrushed; I know that I wouldn’t. You truly are gone when the stories people tell about you become as sweet and artificial as synthetic icing, the messy reality of who you really were too complicated to keep alive.
Lola’s arms are folded across her chest now, the warmth of earlier all but evaporated. I should probably back away, but she was too close to Sally’s final months for me not to try a little harder.
“I’m not trying to be harsh.” I pause, trying to find the words. “It’s just, there’s still a lot of unanswered questions about what happened. This is really horrible but I think you will want to know. The insurance company is trying to say that it could have been suicide.”
Lola’s face drains of color, her eyes as round as saucers. I shouldn’t have told her. It’s fifteen minutes or so before she can make any kind of sense, the shock too overwhelming.
“It’s rubbish,” she keeps saying. “How can they be so callous?”
“I know.”
“William knows it’s a lie, doesn’t he?” she says.
I think of that footage, the way the car pinballs between the lanes like it’s got a mind of its own. Knowing it’s a lie is his truth, but whether it’s the actual truth is a different question all together.
“Yeah, he’s fighting every step of the way. But he’s having to comb through absolutely everything. She had big debts,” I add, tentatively, watching her face. “All these credit cards he didn’t know about.”
My breath has grown tight in my chest, my body telling me what my mind refuses to acknowledge—that I am wading out into quicksand.
“She loved beautiful things,” says Lola, a certain desperation in her eyes.
Just for a second I see us from above, both stretched as tight and tense as the skin on a drum, each new piece reverberating as it hits.
“I’m sorry to drop all of this on you,” I say, smiling at her, hoping that she knows that I care about her, that my being here is about more than Sally. She grabs my hand across the table.
“I’m glad you told me,” she says, her eyes filling again. She pauses a second, and I can see the cogs starting to whir as the shock recedes. “Have you spent quite a bit of time with him then?”
“No, not that much. I think it’s just that he doesn’t have that many people to talk to.”
I pause a second, my words echoing in my head. I meant it as an excuse, but perhaps it’s the truth.
We have one more glass of wine, trying with all our might to find some kind of normality in the midst of chaos. She tells me a little about her life with Justin and their two boys, the contentment and the exasperation sitting side by side, and I try to describe my life to her, unable to convince her that hanging out with a film star isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. The way she hoovers up the details makes me realize how much she’ll miss the flashes of glamour that Sally gave her, those New York trips a highlight in the calendar. When I tell her I’m still single the balance is redressed. “I’m sure you’re going to meet someone really soon,” she says, a kindly sort of pity in her eyes, and I nod my assent, conscious of the loneliness of keeping so much padlocked inside.
How can something so wrong feel so right?
That’s what William said. Did he mean it, or was it just the trauma and the red wine that were talking? Now Lola’s sitting across from me, Sally so present again, I can’t imagine a time when anyone would believe the right could justify the wrong.
We say our goodbyes at the tube, both of us tearful again.
“I’m so glad we had tonight,” she says. “It was . . .” she looks at me, her grief overwhelming, “it was lovely, sort of.”
“I know what you mean,” I say, hugging her so close I can feel the contours of her solid, well-padded body through her coat.
“Soon!” she says.
“Soon,” I agree.
“Anyway, we’ll see each other at the christening, whatever happens.”
I feel my stomach start to drop at the very thought, but I force a smile.
“Course.”
As I’m walking toward my escalator, our goodbyes over, Lola suddenly calls out to me. She runs over, grabs my arm.
“She was trying, you know,” she says, emotional. “I just thought. The last time I was there, I went barging into her room to take her a cup of coffee, and she was pulling all these gorgeous things out of her wardrobe and packing them up. I remember because she really snapped at me, but I can see why now. She was selling them, she said. She must’ve been trying to pay back the money she owed.”
