In the interests of getting on with living my life, I went out the next day to what was supposed to be a quiet little Sunday-evening engagement party in Clapham. The groom was a university friend, Harry, and his bride was a steel butterfly named Vicky. I had reckoned without her desire to make sure everyone she knew was aware she had coerced Harry into making a commitment. There must have been two hundred people at the party, which was in a gastropub that looked out on Clapham Common. I stared out of the window at the autumn leaves in the fading light, and wished I hadn’t come. Shadows gathered under the trees, suggesting lurking figures. The Halloween decorations were up everywhere. I couldn’t for the life of me see why anyone actively sought the thrill of being scared. Forget pumpkins and skeletons and fake cobwebs: John Webster was far more frightening because he was unstoppable, implacable, determined, ruthless.
Take precautions. Improve your security. Be aware of people around you.
I squared my shoulders and turned back to face the room, pinning a smile to my face. I had already caught up with a few people I hadn’t seen for years and I knew there were other friends at the party, but finding anyone in the throng was likely to be difficult. Vicky was everywhere, showing off her engagement ring – a vast diamond solitaire flanked with ruby shoulders – like a dog giving the paw. I had already smiled at it politely even though I thought it looked like a bloodshot eye. Harry was on his way to getting very drunk with his rugby pals, his tie askew, the condemned-man vibe too sincere to be a joke.
‘Don’t lose this!’ The woman next to me was holding up a silver bracelet. I put a hand to my wrist automatically, even though I knew the bracelet couldn’t belong to anyone else. It had been a gift from my father, proper modernist Danish silver: a slithering chain of geometric shapes like very small razor blades.
‘Thanks. It must have fallen off.’
‘I saw it slip off your wrist when you were hugging that big guy.’ She smiled at me, dimples appearing in her cheeks. She was very pretty, with curling dark hair and a knockout figure.
‘Jonesy. I was at university with him. He’s always the tallest person in the room.’
I took the bracelet from her and examined the catch, testing it and discovering it didn’t need much pressure to give way. The safety catch was a delicate loop of metal that went around a tiny stud. I must have knocked it out of place without noticing. I put the bracelet on again and folded the safety catch across carefully.
‘That should hold it. I probably need to get it fixed.’
‘How do you think she did it?’
I looked at her, surprised. ‘Did what?’
‘Nabbed him.’ She was staring at Harry.
‘Oh – pregnancy scare, I should think. Or she made his mother tell him to ask her.’
The woman giggled. ‘Have you met his mother?’
‘A few times. She can make Harry do anything.’
‘I never met her.’ The woman drained her drink and set the glass down on the bar. ‘But then I wasn’t supposed to exist.’
‘You weren’t?’
‘I was Harry’s bit on the side.’
‘I think most of the women here have been Harry’s bit on the side at one time or another.’
‘Even you?’
‘Mmm, no.’ I liked to think it was because I had enough self-esteem to avoid being one of the endless string of girls who had fallen into bed with him and fallen out again immediately afterwards. The truth was that the attraction had never been strong enough on either side to change the rules of our comfortable friendship.
‘I’ve forgotten your name.’
That would be because I hadn’t told her my name. Since she was having a certain amount of trouble focusing already, I didn’t say that. ‘It’s Ingrid.’
‘Ingrid-from-uni?’
I nodded. ‘That sounds like me.’
‘Vicky hates you.’
‘I got that impression. But she has no reason to hate me. I never even went out with Harry. We were just friends.’
‘That’s the point, I think. She thinks you’re “unfinished business”.’ She mimed big loopy quotation marks in the air.
‘Harry has about a hundred girls who are unfinished business and I really don’t think I’m one of them,’ I said drily. ‘But I see most of them are here tonight, so maybe Vicky doesn’t agree with me. She wants to make sure everyone knows the score – not that I was tempted to sleep with him anyway.’
‘I was.’ She had managed to grab another drink from a passing waiter and was in the process of downing it. She surfaced to say, ‘I was tempted and I did. I mean, I was in love with him.’
‘When was this?’
‘For the last seven months.’
I processed that. ‘He’s been being unfaithful to Vicky?’
She nodded mournfully. ‘I’m their neighbour. I’m friends with Vicky. She didn’t tell me about their engagement, though, which makes me wonder if she knew about us all along.’
‘When did you and Harry break up?’
‘Well, we haven’t really. I saw him last night. He gave me my invitation to this party and told me he couldn’t see me for a while but he’d call me when he got back from honeymoon.’
‘Christ almighty, Harry.’ I was genuinely shocked. ‘He wasn’t that bad at university. So much for learning and growing.’
‘Do you know what the worst thing is?’ Her eyes were suddenly swimming with tears. ‘I worked out why he chose me to be his other woman.’
‘Because he liked you?’
‘Because of my name.’ She sniffed. ‘Guess what it is.’
I shook my head.
‘It’s Vicki-with-an-i.’ The tears spilled over and ran down her face. ‘So he didn’t even have to remember who he was with. He’d never slip up.’
Vicki-with-an-i turned out to be an excellent wing man once she’d dried her eyes. She introduced me to the people she knew and I introduced her to the ones I knew and we worked our way through the bar, trying to find her a Harry-replacement to mend her heart. Harry drank steadily, watching her with a hangdog air. I fetched up beside him at one point.
‘Why didn’t you propose to Vicki instead of Vicky? Did you get confused?’
‘Don’t.’
‘Didn’t you do this name trick before? With two Lucys?’
He brightened. ‘No, but there was one term when I had three Fionas on the go. One was at home, two at uni.’
‘You’re a disgrace, Harry.’
‘I know. I can’t help it.’
‘Everything okay here?’ Vicky-the-fiancée stretched up to kiss Harry’s cheek, taking his arm firmly before she turned to glower at me. ‘Did you see my beautiful ring?’
‘I did,’ I cooed. ‘Beautiful.’
‘Did Harry tell you about the wedding?’
‘No, actually, he—’
‘We’re going to Sardinia to get married. Family and really close friends only.’ She paused, savouring the moment. ‘I’m afraid we won’t be able to invite you.’
‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘I got food poisoning once in Sardinia. My memories of it are mainly toilet-related and I’m not sure I’m ready to go back.’
Harry laughed. Vicky-the-fiancée did not.
‘I should go and get myself another drink.’
‘The free bar is about to run out,’ Vicky spat. ‘You’d better hurry.’
‘I’ll run.’
All things considered I was quite glad Harry had had the full use of his balls while he had the chance. From now on they were clearly going to be kept in Vicky’s pocket.
At the bar I found the second Victoria in Harry’s life. She had lined up two drinks and was gulping a third.
‘Do you want to get out of here?’
She nodded. ‘This place is grim. It’s full of stockbrokers and currency traders.’
‘Where do you want to go? It’s Sunday night. I’m not sure anywhere is going to be jumping.’
She grabbed her bag. ‘We’ll find somewhere and make it a party.’
Somehow, we managed to acquire one Ella, one Charles, a Dave and two Sarahs on our way out, despite the fact that Dave appeared to be a stockbroker and I had my doubts about one of the Sarahs. Someone needed to get money out; someone else needed to buy cigarettes. Dave ordered an Uber and Vicki snatched his phone to cancel it while we argued about where to go. Someone else ordered two Ubers, and then Charles flagged down a black cab. Somehow, we ended up in a tiny Italian restaurant in Chelsea where we shared thin, brittle pizzas loaded with mozzarella while drinking carafe after carafe of wine. At one in the morning Charles confessed to being a trader in the City and picked up the bill for all of us, along with Vicki’s telephone number.
‘But I’m not going home with you,’ she purred in his ear. She was unsteady on her feet, which meant that he had to put his arm around her to support her. ‘Even though I want to go home with you. I’m going home with Ingrid. Because she’s my friend.’
‘Of course,’ Charles said lovingly. ‘Let’s get you a cab.’
‘Don’t you want to go to your home?’ I asked her. I wasn’t very keen to have an unexpected houseguest, especially someone I’d never met before. I didn’t think Vicki could possibly be anything to do with John Webster but that was the awful thing – I couldn’t know for sure.
She blinked up at me, trying hard to focus. ‘I want to shout at Harry. If I go home, I’m not going to be able to stop myself, you know?’
I did know. And I was lukewarm about Vicky-the-fiancée but a drunken revelation of Harry’s infidelity was no way to end the evening of your engagement party.
There was a part of me that welcomed the company too. I hadn’t slept well the night before, after Adam left.
‘I don’t have a spare room. You’ll be sleeping on the sofa.’
‘I can sleep anywhere,’ Vicki promised, and proved it by falling asleep with her head on my knee as soon as the taxi started moving. I watched London-by-night flashing past the windows: minicab offices and chicken shops and mopeds delivering takeaways, homeless people bundled into doorways, swaggering drunks, scuttling junkies, limousines and police cars and ambulances and students and cleaners, dead-eyed with exhaustion, dragging themselves from one job to the next. I had been out of my usual territory, in a part of the city I rarely visited any more, with people who had nothing to do with my usual life. I had been able to forget about Webster, most of the time. Now I felt the fear clamp down on me like a large hand closing around my throat as the taxi manoeuvred through the narrow canal-side street to my address. It was a topsy-turvy world when the familiar was frightening.
But at least I had tiny, bubbly Vicki for protection. I shook her awake, and she slid off the back seat to lie in the footwell, mumbling something about school.
The taxi driver helped me to get her into the courtyard where she collapsed on a bench.
‘Mm’okay. I want to look at the stars.’ She threw an arm up and gestured vaguely.
‘I think it’s too cloudy for stars.’ To the taxi driver I said hopefully, ‘There’s just one flight of stairs to my flat.’
‘I’ve got to go.’
‘Thanks anyway. We’ll manage.’ He’d gone, leaving us standing in the courtyard. ‘Probably.’
Vicki was fumbling with something.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Cigarette before we go inside,’ she mumbled, and I twitched it out of her mouth before she could light the filter.
‘Wrong end. Do you even smoke?’
‘When I’m drunk.’ She started to paw at the packet again. ‘I borrowed these from Sarah. No – I think it was Sarah. Other Sarah. Fuck, why does everyone have the same name?’
‘I don’t think smoking is a good idea.’
‘Mmph.’ She was waving the lighter dangerously close to her hair, the flame streaming out like a flag.
‘Look, let me light it for you.’
‘You’re so kind. I’m so glad I met you. You’re my nicest friend, Ingrid.’
‘Course I am.’ I turned away, cupping the flame to shield it from the breeze that was whispering through the reeds in the pond. I felt completely sober now, despite the vast quantities I’d had to drink. The end of the cigarette ignited with a soft fizzle of crisping tobacco and I blew out a cloud of smoke before turning back to discover that Vicki had curled into a ball and gone to sleep again.
‘Brilliant.’ I shook her knee. ‘Vicki. Hey, Vicki.’
Nothing.
‘What’s going on?’ The voice came from behind me.
Shock punched a hole through the pit of my stomach. I whipped around, frightened and angry with it. The anger came out uppermost. ‘Why are you creeping up on me?’
Helen’s eyes widened. ‘I’m not. I was asleep and then I heard a commotion out here.’
I looked at her, taking in the messy hair and the pyjamas with a hoodie thrown over the top and the fluffy slippers with rabbit ears. She was jumping from foot to foot, her arms tightly folded across her chest, obviously freezing. She looked as if she’d just woken up.
‘Is everything okay?’
‘My friend’s asleep. I’m just trying to wake her up so I can get her into my flat. That’s all. No emergency.’
‘She seems pretty out of it.’ She frowned. ‘Are you smoking? I didn’t think you smoked.’
‘I don’t. It wasn’t mine. I was holding it for her.’ I bent down to stub it out on the pavement and she squeaked.
‘Don’t throw it in the pond! There are frogs in there and little fish. It would be bad for them.’
‘I wasn’t going to,’ I said, with dignity. ‘Now if you’ll excuse me—’
Helen bent down to Vicki. ‘Wake up. Hey. Wake up.’
Vicki mumbled something and opened her eyes for a moment.
‘She’s out of it.’
‘What’s her name?’
‘Vicki,’ I said sullenly.
‘Come on, Vicki. You can’t sleep out here.’ Helen had a particularly penetrating voice. Vicki, who had been dead to the world, blinked.
‘What is it?’
‘You need to walk up the stairs. We can’t carry you.’
Vicki got to her feet. She was swaying, and her knees looked as if they were in danger of buckling at any moment, but she was upright.
‘Come on,’ Helen said. ‘Before we all die of hypothermia.’
She set off for the stairs, hauling Vicki with her. I followed, wary in case Vicki slipped back down and collided with me.
‘Give me your keys,’ Helen ordered.
I handed them over obediently and she unlocked the new lock, fitted that very day. Inside, she steered Vicki over to the sofa where she made her lie down and pushed her onto her side with a couple of cushions behind her back.
‘That should stop her from rolling over. She’s absolutely smashed though. You’ll need to check on her if you hear her being sick during the night.’
‘Are you a nurse?’
Helen looked surprised. ‘No – I have first-aid training.’
‘Well, I’m impressed.’ I was, too.
‘I’m going back to bed,’ Helen said. She was still shivering as she headed for the door. ‘She’ll need a blanket. Make it two. Why is it so cold in here?’
‘The boiler is a dick.’
‘You should get it serviced.’
‘Yes,’ I said, and shut the door softly in her face.