There were others too: street scenes around North London, reportage of urban life. Nancy was right, they were good. He seemed to have a talent for it. Like a true photojournalist Jonathan had managed to keep himself out of the picture and capture something real and natural. I am sure Nancy had not had the film developed from his camera by then, but I wonder whether it was these photographs tucked into the back of his scrapbook which made her think about it. She must have assumed she’d find some beautiful images which she could have had framed and shown off.
I was wrong to think that sorting through Jonathan’s things was a sign of her recovery. If anything, she got worse after that. She refused to go out. We didn’t see anyone and after a while lost touch with all our friends. They gave up. I suppose they thought we had each other. It was about five years after Jonathan’s death when she decided that she couldn’t face seeing me either. For a while at least, she said. She needed time by herself, and I respected that, but I worried about her choice of Jonathan’s flat as her retreat.
We’d been left some money by an aunt and we spent it on that flat in Fulham. We bought it for Jonathan the year before he went travelling. We thought it was a good idea for him to have his first taste of independence closer to home, and he moved in for a short while before he left England. Nancy kitted it out with everything he might need: new pans, bed linen. And we donated things of our own too — things we no longer needed, like Nancy’s desk. She used to go over there and give him cooking lessons, teaching him the skills he’d need to be self-sufficient. It was ready for when he came home and we hoped it would give him the space to decide what he wanted to do. We hoped he might go to university.
After he died she still went over now and again to clean it. She didn’t tell anyone in the building what had happened. Perhaps she thought that if they didn’t know then she could pretend, at least in that place, that he was still alive. She lived amongst Jonathan’s things, dressing the place as if it was a shrine, fresh flowers in every room. And at first she let me visit her there, but then one day she asked me not to come anymore. She said it didn’t help her, that I was holding back her recovery. I still telephoned once a week, but after a while even that stopped. She said she would call me when she was ready to come home. I only agreed to her demand because she promised she wouldn’t do anything to harm herself, and something in her voice made me believe her. I thought I heard a shift in it, as if she was at last beginning to find some peace. But it was someone from the Tenants’ Association who called me, not Nancy. It was a year after she’d moved in. It’s painful for me to know how useless I was to her then.
When I got that call, I was terrified she’d broken her promise. They said that there had been complaints about the state of the common parts and a smell was coming from the flat. I cursed myself for having been so weak — for not having gone in before and forced her home. I was convinced that when I let myself in with the key I’d resisted using so often that I would find her dead. She was lying on the sofa, her eyes closed, but she was breathing. There was an unpleasant smell. The toilet had been neglected but the main stench came from a full bin liner by the front door. She had intended to take it down, but simply hadn’t had the strength and so it had sat for weeks, leaking onto the floor, its rotting contents almost capable of making their own way down the stairs. She had cancer, she told me. She was matter-of-fact about it, but by then she was in pain, had been in pain for some time, endured it, relished it even. It is what she had been waiting for. The cancer filled the space which Jonathan had left. I hated that flat. When I went back and found her manuscript, it was the first time I had been there since taking her home all those years ago.
It was that period she meant, I am sure of it, when she told Catherine Ravenscroft that she had “lost her husband.” For a while, we were lost to each other. But I had always believed that it was me who had lost her, not she who had lost me. I thought I was alone in feeling alone so it was a comfort when I read in her notebook that she had felt as I had. She missed me as much as I had missed her.
I took her home and I cared for her and she rallied a little. She survived for another year at home with me. I was still working at the private school, and I admit that I took out my pain on those children. The Macmillan nurses were wonderful. They came in while I was at work to make sure she was okay. She never complained. As I say, she embraced her suffering. It was the kind of suffering she had been searching for, something concrete to dig her nails into.
But now she is alive again — my constant companion. I hear her voice and I speak to her regularly. I told her about the phone call and the sound of fear in the whore’s voice. There are no secrets between us anymore, but Nancy is getting impatient to get on with it now, we both are. We want to see her fear, not just listen to it.
32. SUMMER 2013
Catherine sits at work, her eyes fixed on her computer screen but seeing nothing. Her head is in revolt, unable to hold a coherent thought; each one old and new carries its own pain. The newest, freshest memories hurt the most. Robert has moved out. She thinks he has checked into a hotel, but she is not sure. He won’t speak to her. The last thing he told her was that he couldn’t bear the sight of her. The words had left her gasping. What had she expected? Not that. She knew she had concealed parts of herself from Robert, but she had not realised, until now, how much of him she didn’t know. When she had tried to imagine his response to the book, she had failed to conjure up this bitterness. His anger shocked her; he has allowed it to fill every space, making him deaf to anything she might say. She sleeps in the spare room now, hiding from the emptiness of their bed.
She clicks on her screen, pretending to work, but the shock she’d felt when he had confronted her with the photographs slices through her again. He wants her to be punished. He thinks she deserves it. She had tried not to look at the pictures — tried to flick them away — blinking them into fragments, but they had broken through into her head and it is a one-way street. Those images will never leave now. The photographs were used as the source material for the book, crude and base, wriggling themselves into a false projection of the real story, but it is a story which Robert has chosen to believe. And her years of secrecy have helped him reach his verdict of guilty; her misguided belief that she had a right to silence has condemned her.
“You know the headmaster who left Rathbone College just after Brigstocke was ‘retired’? Well, I’ve found out they were friends at Cambridge. I’ve got a number for him — shall I give him a call?”
“Back off, Kim. There’s no story. Just leave it,” she snaps before she can stop herself. Fuck. She’s losing control here too. She doesn’t want to alienate Kim.
“Sorry, but there’s nothing there. Forget it. Forget Stephen Brigstocke.” She puts a hand on her arm but Kim shakes it off and limps away like an injured puppy. Catherine shouldn’t have spoken to her like that. She must hold it together. Work is her only refuge. She fingers the piece of paper Kim gave her a few days ago, with Stephen Brigstocke’s telephone number and address, and puts it in her pocket.
“Tea?” she calls across, but Kim ignores her. Simon looks over and gives Catherine a smile.
“Yes, please,” he says.
He follows her into the kitchen, cup held out, whitened teeth gleaming.
“Everything all right, Cath?” A whine of concern in his voice. Oh, fuck off. Her hate for this man is unreasonable she knows.