The Perfect Girl (2 page)

At 8 a.m. Tessa still hasn’t stirred, but I’ve been awake since dawn.

I’m a criminal lawyer, with a heavy workload. I often work late and usually I sleep heavily until my alarm goes off, but today I have a hospital appointment that’s been burning a hole in the page of my diary for more than a week, and it’s on my mind the minute my eyes open.

The curtains are drawn at my bedroom window, darkening the room, and light filters round them in lazy, unpredictable curves as they move with the breeze from the river. If I opened them, I would see the wide expanse of the floating harbour outside, and the colourful mixture of modern apartments and old warehouses and boathouses that bundle together on the bank opposite.

But I don’t.

I stay where I am and I notice that the breeze is so soft that it barely disrupts the stillness of the room. They promised us a storm last night, but it never came. There was just a short, violent rain shower, followed by a dusting of drizzle, which offered a brief respite from the heat, but only brief, because now it’s thickening again.

Tessa arrived in the rain, in the middle of the night.

She apologised for disturbing me, as if she hadn’t just made my evening. She said she’d tried to phone. I hadn’t noticed because I’d passed out on the sofa in front of the TV, with the remains of a special chow mein on my lap, and the letter from the hospital on my chest.

When I opened the door to her, I noticed dark smudges of exhaustion on the damp skin underneath her eyes, and she stood very still when I embraced her, as if every muscle in her body was stretched too tight.

She said she didn’t want to talk, so I didn’t press her to. Ours is a quiet, respectful affair; we don’t ask for or expect a comprehensive emotional download from each other. We’re more in the business of providing refuge for one another, and by that I mean a strong, safe place to reside, a place where we are almost certainly what two less reserved adults would call ‘in love’, though we would never say that.

I’m a shy person. I moved from Devon to Bristol two years ago, because it’s what you do if you want to avoid spending your whole life and career amongst the same small circle of people, in the area you grew up in. Opportunities in Bristol are much greater, and I’d cut my teeth on Zoe Guerin’s case, so I felt ready for a change.

But it hasn’t worked out too well for me. My cases are more varied, and the workload is more intense, that’s true, but new friendships haven’t come easily because I have to work all hours, and you don’t meet too many potential partners when you’re doing prison visits and court attendances. So when Tess and I ran into each other, just in the street one day, it felt like a godsend. She was a familiar face, we had shared history, however difficult, and we slipped quickly into a pattern of snatching time with each other, just coffees and drinks at first, and then more. Tessa is married though, so that’s where things have sort of stalled. We can’t move on unless she leaves her husband.

Last night, after she arrived, she flopped on to my sofa as if the stuffing had been knocked out of her, and I brought her a cold beer and discreetly slipped the hospital letter into a drawer on my way to the kitchen, so she wouldn’t see it. I didn’t want it to mar things between us, not until I was sure. Not until I’d got through today’s appointment. It was fairly easy to disguise the numbness in my left hand. Nobody at work had noticed it either.

She sipped her beer and we watched a Hitchcock film, in the dark, and the black and white images on the screen made the room flicker as if it was animated. Beside me, Tessa remained still and quiet as she watched, once or twice rolling the cold drink across her forehead, and I snuck a glance or two at her when I could, wondering what was wrong.

Tessa doesn’t share the white blonde hair, pale skin and refined features of her sister, or her niece – her looks have none of their hauteur – though she does share their sharp blue eyes. Tess mostly wears her thick, silky strawberry-blonde hair tied back, and the open features on her heart-shaped face and her lightly freckled skin make her look approachable, and kind, and her eyes often dance with humour. Her figure is athletic, her attitude is practical and no-nonsense. For me, she is beautiful.

As I look at her now, in the warm darkness of my bedroom, she’s lying with her hands on the pillow beside her face, fingers curled in beside her lips. Only the sight of the tarnished gold wedding ring on her finger mars the picture for me.

After a while, I ease myself out of bed, because I want breakfast. So I’m riffling through a pile of laundry on the floor to locate something to wear when my phone vibrates.

I snatch it up quickly, because I don’t want it to disturb her.

The screen tells me that it’s Jeanette calling, my secretary. She’s always at her desk early, especially on a Monday.

I go through an internal fight with myself, wondering whether to answer it or not, but the truth is that I’m a conscientious chap so the battle was really lost as soon as the phone started buzzing. I answer the call.

‘Sam, I’m sorry, but there’s a client turned up for you here, at the office.’

‘Who?’ I ask, and I mentally shuffle through the deck of some of my more notable clients, trying to guess which of them might have pitched himself or herself off the good behaviour wagon and back into the mud this time.

‘She’s only a girl,’ Jeannette tells me this in a stage whisper.

‘What’s her name?’ As I ask I think, It can’t be, can it?, because I’ve only had one client who was a teenage girl.

‘She says she’s called Zoe Maisey, only you knew her as Zoe Guerin.’

I take myself out of the bedroom, into the en suite, shut the door and sit on the side of the bath. Here, the morning light streams in through the frosted window, yellowing the room, assaulting my dark-widened pupils.

‘You are joking?’

‘I’m afraid I absolutely am not. Sam, she says her mum was found dead last night.’

‘Oh dear God.’

Those three words express in only a paltry way my utter disbelief, because of course Zoe is Tessa’s niece, and her mother, Maria, is Tessa’s sister.

‘Sam?’

‘Can you put her on the phone?’

‘She’s insisting she wants to see you.’

I calculate that because my appointment isn’t until late morning, I probably have time to deal with this, at least partly.

‘Tell her I’m on my way.’

I’m about to hang up the phone when Jeanette adds, ‘And she’s with her uncle,’ and my insides take a swan dive yet again, because Zoe’s uncle is Tessa’s husband.

When you don’t have kids of your own, people have a tendency to give you things to look after. I think they assume that you’re lacking in outlets for any nurturing instincts that you might have.

On the night of Zoe’s concert, the child substitute that I’ve been given to be in charge of is the camera. I’m supposed to be looking after it throughout the duration of the performance, so that I can record it in its entirety. It is, I’m told by my sister in a pedantic way, as if I’m lacking in mental capacity, an important job.

Shall we deal with the reasons for my childlessness straight away? Let’s do it. In spite of the fact that I’m a successful professional and happy in my skin, it’s what people always seem to be most curious about.

So here goes: ‘Unexplained Fertility’ is a thing. It’s an official thing in spite of its unofficial-sounding title, and I have it. My husband Richard and I didn’t discover it until we were in our thirties, because we left having kids until after we’d gone travelling, and established our careers.

After we found out, we tried IVF and went three rounds before we gave up. Surrogacy: I didn’t fancy it; not brave enough. Adoption: same reason. They’d never pass us now anyway, not with Richard’s drinking.

As for being somebody who’s lacking in nurturing instincts, I could snort with laughter over that, because I’m a vet.

My practice is in the city centre, lodged where several of Bristol’s most contrasting neighbourhoods meet. On an average day, I probably see between twenty and twenty-five animals who I prod, probe, stroke, reassure and sometimes muzzle in order to treat their health and sometimes their psychological problems. Then I might reassure, or advise, and very occasionally stroke their owners too if there’s bad news.

In short, I nurture, all day, most days of the week.

But you know there’s a bit of irony here, which never escapes me when I’m with my little sister, especially when I’m roped in to help with her family, as I am tonight.

You see, when we were growing up, Maria was the naughty girl, compared to my Perfect Peter. She had lots of potential as a child, especially musical potential, which got my parents excited, but she never met their expectations.

From a very young age she was feisty, and funny, but when she hit fourteen she began to run wild. While I burrowed into my bedroom in the evenings, swotting away, my heart set on vet school, her desk, on the other side of our bedroom, would be covered only in make-up she’d discarded after getting ready for a night out. She stopped studying, she stopped playing classical music, and she had fun instead.

She didn’t see the point of the rest of it, she said, in spite of the fact that my dad’s eyes bulged when she spoke like that.

Boyfriend-less, much plainer and less socially adept than my beautiful little sister, I loved living vicariously through her and I think she liked that too. She whispered her secrets to me after she got home in the small hours: kisses, and drinks, and pills taken; jealousies and triumphs: adventures, all of them.

But then, to all of our surprise, aged just nineteen she met Philip Guerin at a music festival. He was twenty-seven, and had already inherited the family farm, and she just took off and went to live with him there, and shortly afterwards she married him. Just like that. ‘Living the dream,’ my mother said sarcastically, as she actually wrung her hands.

Zoe followed soon afterwards. Maria had her when she was just twenty-two, and I think it was after that that the reality of life on the farm with a small child began to rub the shiny edges off her a bit. But she didn’t quit, to give her credit. Instead, she began to put all her energies into Zoe, and when Zoe’s extraordinary musicality presented itself as plain to see when she was all of three years old and began to pick out tunes on the piano at the farm, Maria made it her mission to nurture that talent.

That was before the accident, of course, when things went very wrong for them. But my point is, that, in the meantime, having done everything right all my life, and studied hard, and followed the rules, I am married, sure, but I’ve ended up with no children. I’ve come to terms with it, but Richard isn’t coping so well, especially after a dramatic professional disappointment, which coincided with me refusing to go for IVF round number four.

So here we are tonight. I’m helping my sister and Zoe, which is something I love to do when Maria will let me; I’m looking forward to the performance, because Zoe’s playing has almost regained the standard it used to be, before she went to the Unit, and I’m sure she’s going to blow everybody away tonight, and I’m hoping I won’t mess up the job of recording everything.

I’ve had a meagre thirty-second tutorial from Lucas, the son of my sister’s newish husband, on how to operate the camera. Lucas is a film and camera buff, so I was in good hands, but the tutorial wasn’t really enough, because by instinct I’m a bit of a technophobe, and even as Lucas was saying them, I felt his words swimming uncontrolled around my head like a panicky shoal of fish.

I could do with my Richard being here to help me, but he’s let me down again.

Just an hour ago I went to find him when it was time to get ready for the concert. He was in the shed at the bottom of our garden, supposedly working on building a model aeroplane, but when I got there I found him squeezing out the dregs of his box of wine from the shiny bladder inside. He’d ripped the cardboard away and he was massaging and twisting that silvery bag as if it was a recalcitrant udder, holding it over his tea mug.

As I stood watching in the doorway, a few pale drops of liquid dribbled from the bag into the mug. Richard drank it immediately and then he noticed me. He made no apology and no effort to hide what he was doing. ‘Tess!’ he said. ‘Do we have another box?’

Even from the doorway I could tell that his breath stank and his speech was slurred, and although he was trying to behave like a civilised drinker, somebody just enjoying a glass of white on a Sunday afternoon, shame wandered across his features and exaggerated the tremor in his hands. The balsa wood model he was ostensibly there to make lay in its box, all the precision cut pieces still lying in perfect order underneath the unopened instruction manual.

‘In the garage,’ I said. And I left to go to the concert on my own.

So now I’m here with a camera that I’m not sure is working properly, a pounding head and a disappointed heart, and I’m telling myself that I mustn’t, I must not, give in to temptation and go and see Sam after the concert tonight, because that would be wrong.

Lucas hears the shouting before me.

He stops playing first, but I don’t notice immediately because we’re in the middle of a complicated passage of music that always pulls me through it with the unstoppability of a freight train.

When I realise that his hands have stilled, and that I’m playing on my own, I keep going at first, glancing at him because I wonder if he’s forgotten his part. We’re playing the duet from memory, and that happens sometimes: your brain just freezes.

So I’m expecting him to pick up the melody at any moment, I’m
willing
him to remember, because this concert must be perfect, and I’m doing that right up until the moment when I work out that he’s properly stopped, because a man is standing in the centre of the aisle.

So I stop playing too and, as the last vibrations from my chords die away, I look at the man, and I think I might recognise him.

The expression on his face is smudged out of normal. It’s in no way appreciative of our playing, it’s red with rage; the tendons on his neck are straining so much that they look like extra bones.

‘It’s a travesty!’ he shouts. ‘A travesty! It’s disrespectful!’ His words ricochet around the space, and one or two people stand up.

He’s staring at me and I realise that I do know him.

I know him because I killed his daughter.

The piano stool makes very little noise when I stand up, because even though it tips over, it’s on a square of crimson carpet that breaks the sound of its fall so that it’s a dull thud only.

My mother rises from her seat. She knows the man too.

‘Mr Barlow,’ she says. ‘Mr Barlow, Tom, please,’ and she starts to walk towards him.

I don’t stay. I’m too afraid of what he might do to me.

I leave the stage, my hip clashing painfully with the edge of the piano, and I flee towards the back of the church, away from him, to where there’s a doorway behind the altar that takes me out of his sight. I shove through it, then clatter down slippery stone steps into a tiny room where there’s just a sink draped with stained cloths and I crouch in a corner, shaking, drenched yet again with the cold sweat of my remorse, with the impossibility of this life of mine, of second chances or fresh starts, until eventually my mum finds me.

She says words that mean nothing but are an attempt to make me feel better. She says them to me in a hushed voice, and her hand smooths the hair on my head, smooths it lightly down my back. She says, ‘Shush now. Shush,’ but I’m not sure if that’s because she wants to comfort me or because she wants my sobbing to quieten down so nobody else can hear me.

Fifteen minutes later – it takes that long for us to be sure that they’ve got rid of Thomas Barlow and his raging grief – she leads me out of a back door, through the graveyard, and towards the car.

There’s no question that I’ll perform now. I’m still shaking, and the notes are all jumbled in my head anyway.

Outside, I take in the fact that the night is deeply dusky and warm, and that feels like a balm after the cold air inside. I notice a strong smell from the glowing white roses that hang over the churchyard gate, and the dark fluttering of bats that swarm from a high corner of the church tower. Around us, as we walk in the tired grass, gravestones whose cadaverous foundations have failed them lean against one another for support. I see a Celtic cross, the contours of lichen-covered stone mounds, writing everywhere, words of remembrance, and, above us, the dark, pointed leaves of the yew tree greedily sucking away the last of the light.

From inside the church we hear the sound of Lucas beginning his Debussy. The show must go on. The sound is a warm bath of notes at first, then a river flowing. It’s something beautiful, which I wrap around me to shield me from what’s just happened.

It diverts me from looking down at the edges of path where there’s a plaque that has been recently laid. ‘Amelia Barlow’ is inscribed on it. ‘Aged 15. Beloved by family, cherished by friends. The sun shone brighter when you were alive.’ There are freshly tended flowers planted around it.

We didn’t know that her family had laid a plaque for her there. We would never have hired that church as a venue if we’d known, never in a million years. Continents would have drifted and reformed before we’d have done that.

For the whole drive home my mum says almost nothing, apart from, ‘It doesn’t matter. We can reorganise the concert, and you’ll be ready for the diploma. You’re already ready.’

My mother: who never talks about what really matters, and who is trying to reassure me, because although public musical performance at the child prodigy level was my downfall tonight, she believes it’s ultimately going to be my salvation. She believes that it was the catalyst for our second life, and that it will also be the fuel that will propel it into a stratosphere that is a gazillion light years away from our life so far.

And perhaps I should have listened harder when she spoke because it was the last time she ever truly reassured me, the last time I felt the frustration of our inability to connect with each other prickle the air between us.

Perhaps I should have emerged from the cocoon of my own misery to ask her if she was OK, even though that was the one thing we hadn’t been for the past few years. We hadn’t been OK.

But I wish I had. Asked her, I mean. I wish I had.