The impulse to apologise almost won through. She felt herself wavering, on the brink of reverting to a former self. Then her anger kicked in. “What did you expect?”
“I didn’t expect you to get hysterical, that’s for sure.” His tone was scathing and familiar. “You need to see a shrink.”
Kate felt gagged with fury. Lucy spoke for her. “One of you does, but it isn’t her. And I think you’ll find attempted rape’s more a police matter, anyway.”
Heads turned as people streamed past. Paul gave Lucy a murderous look. “You stay out of this.”
Kate had regained control of herself. “There’s nothing for her to stay out of. You’re not worth bothering with.”
She took another step down, so they were almost touching. She stared at him. “Are you going to move?”
There was a moment of stasis. Then he broke his gaze from hers and moved to one side. Kate brushed past without giving him another glance. She held herself tense as she walked, feeling him staring after her. Lucy followed a step or two behind. The sunlight was cut off as they entered the cool of the subway tunnel. Paul’s shout reverberated after them.
“Fucking bitch!”
Kate carried on walking, her eyes fixed straight ahead. The shouts pursued her, bouncing off the hard walls.
“you think you’re so fucking clever, don’t you? Well, ask your friend who she used to shag. Go on, you smug bitch! Ask her!”
The shouts became indistinct as they went further into the station. Kate was conscious of Lucy beside her, but didn’t look at her. Neither spoke. She walked through the crowded foyer and stopped by an out-of-order ticket machine. A few feet away the turnstiles rattled and clacked as people pushed through. Lucy cleared her throat. “Look, Kate …”
“Is it true?”
Lucy hesitated, then nodded. The rigidity that had supported Kate so far ebbed out of her.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Lucy’s face was uncharacteristically distressed. “Because it was ages before you started seeing him. I didn’t even know you then. I hadn’t even met Jack. It wasn’t anything serious.”
“So why keep quiet about it?”
“What else could I do? I couldn’t say anything once you’d started seeing him, could I? You’d have thought I was just being catty!”
“But why didn’t you tell me afterwards?”
“What, in the state you were in when you split up? How could I?”
“Lucy, that was three years ago! Why haven’t you said anything before now?”
Lucy shrugged, helplessly. “There didn’t seem much point. And the longer I left it, the harder it got. I always meant to, Kate, honest! I just … well, I never seemed to get around to it.” Her forehead creased in consternation. “Sorry.”
Kate turned away. Coming on top of her earlier excitement, the revelation had left her drained. But, as the initial shock wore off, she realised that if Lucy had confessed to having had a relationship with Paul — to having fucked him — it would have ended their friendship. Even up to a year ago, perhaps less, Kate knew she probably couldn’t have coped with it. So how could she blame Lucy for keeping quiet? More to the point, if it had been before Kate even met him, what business of hers was it anyway? Suddenly, it all seemed too long ago, involving people she could barely remember. Lucy was watching her, anxiously. Kate gave her a tired smile. “Don’t look so grim. I’m not going to excommunicate you.”
Lucy was still unconvinced. “You’re not cross?”
“No, I’m not cross.”
Relief lightened Lucy’s face. “Oh, thank God for that! I thought, God, if that bastard’s gone and stirred things up after all this time, I’ll kill him!” Sudden doubt presented itself. “He hasn’t, has he? You really mean it?”
“Of course I mean it.”
As she spoke, Kate wondered if that was true. There was no jealousy or resentment, but a kernel of disappointment had begun to form. Lucy’s contempt for Paul had always been a reassuring constant. Now it seemed unreliable. Abruptly, Kate wanted to be alone. “Look, you’d better go,” she said. “You’ll be late for the kids.”
Lucy gave her a hug. “I’ll ring you.”
Kate watched her disappear into the crowd, then went through the turnstile and made her way to the Victoria line. She stood on the escalator, letting it carry her at its own speed instead of walking down as she usually did. Lucy and Paul. Even the words didn’t seem right together. A movement caught her eye. A bearded man was coming up the opposite escalator, carrying a baby in a papoose on his back. The baby was goggling across at the people on her side, and Kate smiled as it spotted her. She turned her head to watch it go past, and a sudden thought took the smile from her face. She could have had a child by Paul. The thought made her go cold. She reached the bottom of the escalator and stepped off. Around her, people were rushing for the platform where a train had pulled in, but Kate barely noticed. She walked slowly, lost in the narrowness of her escape. If, if, she decided to have a baby, she would make damn sure it had a better father than that, even if he was only a father in absentia. Faceless donor or not, before she committed herself she would want to be sure he wasn’t another Paul. Or someone even worse. She shuddered to think of it. She’d made a bad mistake once. This time she would be more careful.
CHAPTER 4
When she was six, there had been a suburban cinema not far from her home. It had been run-down and struggling even then, on a downslide that would end with it becoming first a bingo hall, then a supermarket, and finally a car park. But for Kate, who had never been to any other cinema, the chewing-gum-patterned carpet and threadbare seats didn’t matter. They were part of the darkened atmosphere, along with the rustle of crisp bags and the cigarette smoke that meandered in the flickering beam of light overhead. The images on the screen were a window to another world, and once lost in that technicolour glamour, the shabby theatre, school, and even home itself became insubstantial as ghosts. Her visits to the old cinema were rare, but all the more treasured because of that. When she found out that Jungle Book was being shown again, it became her mission in life to see it. The film wasn’t new, but that hardly mattered to Kate, who had missed it the first time around. Her mother told her they would go to see it “soon”, a typically vague assurance that she was already coming to interpret as “never”, unless she pushed. Which she did, until finally her mother agreed to take her on a Saturday morning. First, though, there came the ritual of Weekend Shopping.
Kate’s mother had insisted that the best cuts of meat for her father’s tea, and for Sunday lunch the next day (another ritual, equally sacred), would have gone by the time the film was over. So Kate had trailed around after her, agonising over each minute spent in the butcher’s and greengrocer’s as her mother intently considered each item before she either bought it or moved on to another. By the time they arrived at the cinema the feature had already started, and Kate’s mother refused to pay for something they wouldn’t see all of. The ticket clerk suggested coming back for the later showing, but her mother was already drifting out, the attempt made, duty done. They had gone home, where her mother had continued with the business of fretting over her father’s tea. Kate watched as she chopped vegetables and carefully cut off every scrap of fat from the meat, so that her husband wouldn’t have to face that chore himself when he ate it. Kate had waited until her mother was completely engrossed, and then quietly set off for the bus stop. The ticket clerk, a florid woman with badly permed hair, had recognised her when she slid the money she had taken from her piggy bank through the hole in the glass screen. “Let you come on your own, has she?” the woman asked, mouth tightening in disapproval. Kate let her silence answer. The woman pushed her ticket through the slot. “Don’t deserve kids, some people,” Kate heard her mutter, as she went inside. It was early evening when she arrived back home. Her parents were furious. Looking back, Kate supposed they must have been worried, but that didn’t come through at the time. Only the anger. Her father had hit her and sent her to bed without anything to eat. Her mother, bewildered at her daughter’s wilfulness, followed his example, as she always did. “Your father’s tea was ruined! Ruined! You bad girl!” she had hissed before closing the bedroom door. Kate cried herself to sleep, hungry and with her father’s handprint livid on the skin of her leg. But she had still seen the film. As she had grown older, the incident had passed into family lore, diluted and joked about, but never forgotten. “Just took herself off, without a word to anyone,” her mother would say at family gatherings. “Typical Kate. Even then she was always a stubborn little thing. Determined to do what she wanted.”