‘You knew I had the money. I know Grace spoke to you about it,’ Seb says. ‘We had an argument about it. You wanted to give it straight to Grace.’
She wriggles in her seat and then suddenly stands, pushing her chair back with a screech. ‘What’s this all about, Sebastian? You can’t have called me all the way here for this.’
Seb stands and then sits back down again. He looks at me for permission but I haven’t caught up with him. ‘We need it, Nina. Xand needs it. Now,’ he says, pulling his sleeves back.
‘Well, I’m sorry you’ve wasted your time. I don’t know anything about the money. I never even laid eyes on it. And then I left you – and this house. And you know exactly what I took with me,’ she says and draws her coat together as if to leave.
Before she can get to her feet, Seb puts a hand out. ‘Nina,’ he says, and then I see that he is holding up an earring. It swings in his fingers.
‘What’s that?’ she says, and we both look at Seb.
‘It was by the trunk that had the money in it.’ Seb calmly places it into her hand. I stare at her and then him. I didn’t see it by the trunk.
‘So, I lost an earring.’
‘It was by the trunk, Nina.’
‘What trunk?’
‘The one that used to be our coffee table. The one with all the money in it,’ he says, raising his voice.
‘I’ve never even been in your goddamned loft,’ Nina says, her voice piercing the air. And as soon as she says it, she stops, and then sighs.
‘I didn’t say it was in the loft,’ Seb says.
‘Oh, where else was it going to be?’ she says and sits back down. ‘Get me a proper drink.’
‘You stole it?’ I ask.
‘Don’t be so sanctimonious, Xander. You stole it in the first place. It was Grace’s money. You dropped her and then emptied her account.’
‘Dropped her?’ I say, incredulous at the accusation. And even as I say it, I realise that of all the things Nina is saying to me, this is the thing that hurts most. ‘She left me. You know that, Nina. You do know that?’ My voice now is the one inflected with anger. The earth is shifting beneath me. I don’t know who I am if I am not the person who was left broken by Grace. I can’t be misremembering this.
‘I know what I know,’ she says, her tone flat.
‘Is that what she told you?’ I say. ‘That I left her?’
‘No. She didn’t tell me that, Xander. She wouldn’t tell me that – she didn’t have to. She was destroyed when you left.’
My head reels and I can’t seem to grasp a still moment. I need something to anchor me, a thought, a reliable thought that is beyond shifting. I find nothing. And so, on I spin. In the background, I hear Seb questioning Nina urgently about the money and her responding in slow, liquid tones. I catch splinters of conversation as I spin on and on.
Where is it now? Xander needs it. The police. Police? POLICE? Murder investigation. It could be evidence. We need the money back, Nina. It’s gone.
Xander.
‘Xander,’ she says.
‘Nina! Don’t.’
And then I am here, my face stinging from her hand. The room has become still. Nina and Seb flushed as if they have stepped off a fairground ride. They have been talking but to me they’ve done it all as if behind glass. All I can think of is this – that Grace said that I’d left her, destroyed her when I did. I can’t make any sense of this. Through the fog I see Seb gesticulating at Nina, as if calming her. She is close. Too close to me. And now she is pushing against me as Seb restrains her. Everything is imbued with a muffled, dreamlike quality.
‘You murdered her?’ she shrieks, piercing the spongy atmosphere, before chasing her voice with another slap.
‘Stop it! He didn’t murder Grace,’ Seb says, pulling her arm back.
‘The police don’t investigate people for murder without evidence.’
‘They do exactly that, Nina. He didn’t kill her.’ I hear the words but I am still consumed by this information. Why would Grace have been destroyed by me if she had left me, if she didn’t love me any longer?
‘She didn’t love me any more. That’s why she left,’ I say quietly to myself.
Nina swings her fringe out of her eyes. ‘Even you can’t believe that.’
‘I do believe that. That’s what she told me,’ I say, and as I do I feel my eyes stinging.
‘You want to know what she told me? She told me that you didn’t love her. That all you ever loved was a version of her that you had created. You didn’t love anything about the real her,’ Nina says.
‘How can you say that?’ I cry.
‘Because it’s true, Xander. You always thought you were better than her. Cleverer.’
‘I did not.’
‘You sneered at the things she loved. The yoga, the Buddhism, all of it. You even sneered at her taste in music.’
‘Her music?’
‘Yes, you hated her music. You made her feel worthless, Xander, at every turn.’
The words ring in my ears and now there is no room in my head for everything else I have been told in the last twenty-four hours.
I am aware of getting up and of following myself along the hall. Seb calls me back and then I am outside in the night. Wading through the air.
I walk hoping for a sliver of calm but for the longest time it doesn’t come. And then, at last, it begins. Every step rinses a drop of something from inside my head. Each stride cleanses, but only by fractions. I can’t walk quickly enough to stop the thoughts from multiplying, just for a second, so that I can get a proper handle on them. For some minutes I walk in a direction that I’ve walked before, and then I am at the Horniman grounds again. Something brings me back here time and again. It is as if the ghost of Grace is stronger here.
Once over the low wall I sit with my back against the other side of it. It is hallowed, the space here; I don’t need to go further. The wind collects in pockets and then blusters into my clothes, carrying off with it every bubble of warm air. I shiver. A shard of that memory pricks me whenever I am here.
A bench.
My hands in the soil.
There is something in what Nina has said, but I can’t for the moment grasp it firmly. The Buddhism – she was right about that – and the yoga. But was I supposed to indulge her in it as she indulged herself? We both knew that it wasn’t real, this spiritual odyssey of hers. She wore it obviously and mischievously.
But the music was real. At first, I didn’t get it. Pop, maybe – she was young. We all were. But eighties music? The worst of the musical decades, proved by posterity. But later I did get it, when it was too late. She wasn’t interested in the artistry or the symmetry or the poetry of the music. She didn’t care about the lyrics either. It was the mood she loved, how the music made her feel. It reminded her of things that she’d never experienced and of places she’d never seen. It had the power to alter her emotionally.
I have a memory of leaving her a gift. But her reaction to it escapes me. Maybe I wasn’t there when she received it or opened it. But I remember the things before it. I remember Tower Records in Piccadilly. I remember picking out the record and wrapping it and then carrying it to her house in the cold weather. Did I leave it at the door? It was too big surely to go through the letter box. In any case when I bought it, it was so I could tell her that, at last, I understood. It was an LP with her favourite song in it, ‘Fils de la Terre’ by Jack T. She’d originally played it on a cassette over and over again until one day the tape ran thin and just snapped. She was devastated. Resolved never to replace it. It’s not the same if I get another one, she’d said, it could never be the same.
When I bought the record, I wanted her to know that it didn’t have to be the same. It could be better instead. Vinyl not tape. Music to listen to in one place, not on the move. A song to be played at home, in confined space so that it could liberate you.