‘What do you mean my er husband, Mike? He’s my husband. I can show you the piece of paper if you like.’
‘I didn’t mean anything like that, Alice. It just takes some getting used to. How long have you known him?’
‘A couple of months, I suppose.’
‘Amazing. I must say that when I first heard about it, I thought you’d gone off your rocker. It didn’t seem like the Alice Loudon I knew. Now I can see that we were all wrong.’
‘We?’
‘Everybody in the office.’
I was aghast. ‘You all thought I’d gone mad?’
‘We were all surprised. But now I can see that you were right and we were wrong. It’s just like in the article. It’s all about the ability to think clearly under pressure. Your husband has it.’ Mike had been looking into his coffee cup, out of the window, anywhere but at me. Now he turned and looked at me. ‘You’ve got it too.’
I tried to stop myself giggling at the compliment, if that’s what it was. ‘Well, thank you, kind sir. Back to business.’
By Tuesday I felt I had talked to everybody in the world who had my phone number in their book, except Jake. Even so I was surprised when Claudia told me there was a Joanna Noble on the phone for me. Yes, it was really me she wanted to talk to and not just as a way of getting to Adam. And, yes, it was important and she wanted to meet face to face. That very day, if possible. She would come to somewhere near my office, right now if I had the time. It would only be for a few minutes. What could I say? I told her to come to Reception and an hour later we were sitting in an almost empty sandwich bar round the corner. She hadn’t spoken except to shake my hand.
‘Your story has given me a sort of reflected glory,’ I said. ‘At least I’m the wife of a hero.’
She looked uncomfortable and lit a cigarette. ‘He is a hero,’ she said. ‘Between ourselves, I had qualms about some of the piece, dishing out blame the way I did. But what Adam did up there was incredible.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He is, isn’t he?’ Joanna didn’t respond. ‘I assumed you would be on to another story by now,’ I said.
‘Several,’ she said.
I saw she had a piece of paper which she was fingering. ‘What’s that?’
She looked down, almost as if it had arrived in her hands without her knowing and she was startled by it.
‘This arrived in the mail this morning.’ She handed me the paper. ‘Read it,’ she said.
It was a very short letter.
Dear Joanna Noble,
What you wrote about Adam Tallis made me sick. I could tell you the truth about him if you were interested. If you are interested, look up in newspapers for 20 October 1989. If you want you can talk to me and I’ll tell what he’s like. The girl in the story is me.
Yours sincerely,
Michelle Stowe
I looked up at Joanna, puzzled. ‘Sounds deranged,’ I said.
Joanna nodded. ‘I get plenty of letters like that. But I went to the library – I mean the archive of newspapers and cuttings at the office – and found this.’ She handed me another piece of paper. ‘It’s not a very big story. It was on an inside page, but I thought… Well, see what you think.’
It was a photocopy of a small news item headed: ‘Judge Raps Rape Girl’. A name in the first paragraph was underlined. Adam’s:
A young man walked free on the first day of his trial for rape at Winchester Crown Court yesterday when Judge Michael Clark instructed the jury to find him not guilty. ‘You leave this courtroom without a stain on your character,’ Judge Clark told Adam Tallis, 25. ‘I can only regret that you were ever brought here to answer such a flimsy and unsubstantiated charge.’
Mr Tallis had been charged with raping Miss X, a young woman who cannot be named for legal reasons, after what was described as ‘a drunken party’ in the Gloucester area. After a brief cross-examination of Miss X, which focused on her sexual history and her state of mind during the party, the counsel for the defence, Jeremy McEwan QC, moved for a dismissal, which was immediately accepted by Judge Clark.
Judge Clark said that he regretted ‘that Miss X had the benefit of the cloak of anonymity while Mr Tallis’s name and reputation were dragged through the mire’. On the court steps, Mr Tallis’s solicitor, Richard Vine, said that his client was delighted with the judge’s verdict and just wanted to get on with his life.
When I had finished, I picked up my coffee cup with a steady hand and took a sip. ‘So?’ I said. Joanna said nothing. ‘What is this? Are you planning to write something about it?’
‘Write what?’ said Joanna.
‘You’ve built Adam up,’ I said. ‘Maybe it’s time to knock him down.’
Joanna lit another cigarette. ‘I don’t think I deserve that,’ she said coolly. ‘I’ve said everything I have to say about mountaineering. I have no intention of contacting this woman. But…’ Now she paused and looked uncertain. ‘It was more about you than anything else. I didn’t know what was the right thing to do. In the end, I decided it was my responsibility to show you it. Maybe I’m being pompous and interfering. Just forget about it now, if you want.’
I took a deep breath and made myself speak calmly. ‘I’m sorry I said that.’
Joanna gave a thin smile and blew out a cloud of smoke. ‘Good,’ she said. ‘I’ll go now.’
‘Can I keep these?’
‘Sure. They’re only photocopies.’ Her curiosity visibly got the better of her. ‘What are you going to do?’
I shook my head. ‘Nothing. He was found innocent, wasn’t he?’
‘Yes.’
‘Without a stain on his character, right?’
‘Right.’
‘So I’m going to do nothing at all.’
Nineteen
Of course, it wasn’t quite that simple. I told myself that Adam had been found not guilty. I told myself that I had married him and promised to trust him. This was the first test of that trust. I wasn’t going to say anything to him; I wasn’t going to honour the slander with a response. I wasn’t going to think about it.
Who was I fooling? I thought about it all the time. I thought about this unknown girl, woman, whatever, drunk with a drunk Adam. I thought about Lily, taking off her T-shirt to reveal her pale mermaid’s body and her livid back. And I thought about the way Adam was with me: he tied me down, put his hands around my neck, ordered me to follow his instructions. He liked to hurt me. He liked my weakness under his strength. He watched me carefully to track my pain. As I examined it, sex between us, which had seemed like delirious passion, became something else. When I was alone in my office, I would close my eyes and remember different excesses. Remembering gave me a queasy and peculiar kind of pleasure. I didn’t know what to do.