The man at the front desk started rummaging through the papers in front of him.
‘She’s not expecting me,’ I said.
‘Who shall I say is calling?’
‘My name is Tess Moreau. If she says she’s busy, you can tell her it’s about Jason Hallam. It’s important and I’m not going away until I’ve seen her.’
My own voice sounded unfamiliar to me – clear, sharp and commanding. He raised his bushy eyebrows and picked up the phone.
I barely had time to sit down before the lift door opened and a woman came out and walked quickly over to me. I stood up and we looked at each other for a few seconds, unsmiling. At least she wasn’t going to pretend.
‘Shall we go for a walk?’ I said.
‘We can go to Lincoln’s Inn Fields. It’s a bit quieter there.’
We walked side by side, crossed the busy road and then passed through a narrow passage that opened up into a lush green space, trees rustling with new leaves and tulips blazing in the beds. I allowed myself to look at her properly. Ellen Dempsey had short hair and narrow dark almond-shaped eyes. She had a piercing in her eyebrow and one in her nose, and a rather beautiful tattoo, like a vine or a branch, running up her left arm. She was wearing a black leather skirt and wedged trainers. I took all this in, understanding what I had already known: she was young, so very young. Much younger than me; a whole different generation. It occurred to me that she was about the same age as my youngest half-sister, Polly. I’d been twelve when Polly was born and had always thought of her as a baby. Was this Jason’s type? Ellen didn’t look like Emily, who was also young, of course: she was slimmer, more angular, fiercer-looking.
After we had entered the gate into what was almost a little park, Ellen turned and faced me, wrapping her arms protectively round her body. Her lips were twitching slightly and she kept biting them.
‘I’m not with him anymore,’ I said.
‘I know.’
‘He’s married to someone else.’
‘I know that too.’
I waited. Ellen took a deep breath.
‘He sent me a text saying that he was getting married.’ She swallowed and wiped her nose with the sleeve of her sweater like a small child. ‘I thought I was going to go mad. I tried to get in touch with him just so that he could explain what had happened and he said that if I went on pestering him, he would get a lawyer involved. Like I was stalking him or something. I just wanted him to explain.’
‘That’s what you get for sleeping with married men.’
‘He wasn’t married,’ she said, then screwed up her small face. ‘Sorry, that’s a crap thing to say. I know that doesn’t matter. He had you, he had a child.’
‘That’s right. He had me. He had a child. Why did you do it?’
Ellen met my gaze; she had a punkish, slightly confrontational air.
‘Have you asked Jason that question?’
I nodded. She was right: Ellen hadn’t betrayed me. Jason had. I’d always disliked the way women blame the other woman, because it is less painful that way. It lets them avoid looking at what really mattered, what had really been done to them.
‘Not yet. I will, though.’
She grimaced and it was as if all the breath was going out of her.
‘Oh fuck,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to sound like that. It’s just…’ She shrugged her slender shoulders. ‘I didn’t even want to have a relationship, certainly not one with an older man who was already with someone else and had a child. I’d come out of a bad break-up and I wasn’t in a good place. We just talked at a party.’ She looked away and added, almost too softly for me to hear: ‘You were there, actually, a few feet away on the other side of the room, laughing with a group of people, so it was a bit weird. He rang me up the next day.’
I tried to keep my face expressionless, but I felt a sharp pain, as if I’d been punched. She could have been describing the way Jason and I had first met, all those years ago when I was a young fool, vulnerable and ready for heartbreak.
‘He was pretty persistent,’ Ellen continued. ‘I guess I was flattered. It wasn’t even meant to be a date. You probably don’t want to hear this.’
‘I’m trying to join up the dots, make sense of my past.’
Ellen nodded. She got that.
‘He was so in love with me, or at least he made me feel that he was. He made me feel like I was the most gorgeous woman in the world. He said he wanted to be with me, but it was difficult with everything. I thought—’ Then she stopped.
‘What?’
‘I thought you maybe knew about it all. At the time, I mean. He kind of suggested you had separate lives and you’d be OK with it.’
I squinted at Ellen through the glare of the sun and said nothing.
‘So you really didn’t know?’
‘I really didn’t. When did it start?’
‘What a fuck-up.’
‘When did it start?’
‘About two years ago. Early summer. At first he made all the running and then, somehow, I fell in love with him. After a few months it seemed to get harder to see each other, but I didn’t read the signals. I was such an idiot. In the end he sent me that text.’
‘That was a year ago?’
‘Something like that.’
‘What happened then?’
‘You really want to know?’
‘I do.’
Ellen wiped tears off her cheeks with the back of her hand.
‘I thought I was going crazy. He’d made me believe he couldn’t live without me, then he just behaved as if it had all been nothing, a fling. He left you and—’
‘It was mutual,’ I said, interrupting. ‘We left each other.’
But was that even true? I didn’t know any more and not knowing made me feel weak and untethered.
‘Whatever,’ said Ellen cautiously. ‘You separated and he didn’t want anything to do with me. I suppose he’d met this other woman.’
I was about to interrupt again, to tell her that he had met Emily after we’d parted, but I didn’t. Because who knew if that was the case?
‘That word “dumped”, that’s how I felt.’ Ellen looked away from me, across the brightness of the park. ‘Thrown away. I tried to contact him and I wrote to him and I thought of going round there and slashing his tyres or smashing his window, or going to the school and making a public nuisance of myself. He wouldn’t have liked that. I went to a therapist instead, which was a much better idea, because now I don’t want to kill myself and I don’t even want to kill him, or shame him, I just want to get on with my life and never, ever be dependent like that again. I think he’s an arsehole, a typical male shit who preys on the vulnerable, and I’m really, really, really sorry. But I think you’re better off without him.’
‘You do? That’s all right then.’
‘Sorry. That was a stupid thing to say.’
‘It was. Though I agree with you.’
Ellen hesitated, then spoke in a rush. ‘Was he ever violent?’
‘What! What are you saying? Did he hit you?’
‘No.’ A flush moved up her neck and into her face. ‘But he… I always thought it was possible. You know.’
‘Right.’ I felt a bit sick.
‘Every so often he was scary. So I wondered…’
‘No.’
‘Good.’
‘Had he had other affairs?’
Ellen flinched. ‘I don’t know. You’d have to ask him. I mean… I kind of assumed but I don’t know.’
‘You said that you tried to contact him. When exactly was that?’
‘When he left me and I was in a mess.’
‘Have you tried to contact him again or seen him?’
‘Why on earth would I? I’m done with all of that. I never want to be that person again.’