Martha cut her weekend short and came back that night. I was sitting upstairs in one of the armchairs, clutching a cushion to my chest. When I heard the front door, my heart bumped. I had been dreading her return. I was staring at Dalziel and Pascoe on television. I couldn’t concentrate enough to follow the plot but Dalziel’s big, doleful face seemed to express all the sorrow and uncertainty in the world. The reverberation of the door slamming shuddered through the house. I heard her bags being thrown down and she came up the stairs two at a time.
She stood in the doorway like a Fury. ‘How could you?’ she shouted. ‘How could you do that? To Lucas? To Rachel?’ Even her hair seemed angry. Long as it was, it stood away from her head as if it was electrified. She held her hands out in front of her, the fingers stiff with tension, as if imploring me to give her an explanation that would go some way to helping her understand how I could behave like this.
‘I didn’t set out to do it, Marth. It just happened,’ I said limply.
‘Bullshit.’ Her right hand cut through the air like a blade on the second consonant. ‘Even if he had come after you in the biggest way possible, you could always have said no. You could always have said no, Joanna, but you didn’t. And now you’ve dicked over two of your oldest friends. I just cannot believe you did that.’ She sat down on the arm of the sofa as if I had pulled all the stuffing out of her.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, feeling the inadequacy of the word.
‘That doesn’t really cover it.’ She shook her head. ‘Of all people, I thought you’d get it. Anyway, it’s not me you should be apologising to.’
‘How can I do it? How can I ever tell them how sorry I am?’
‘I’m not sure you can.’
‘Please help me, Martha,’ I said. ‘I feel so bad.’
‘You should have thought of that before. And I can’t help you right now. Don’t ask me to.’ She stood up to go, as if she had exposed herself to my presence for as long as she could without becoming contaminated by it. ‘Because all this makes me ask questions. Like, if you can do this to Lucas and Rachel, what’s to say you couldn’t do it to me, next time I meet someone I really like? I don’t know whether I even trust you any more.’
That night was the closest I have ever come to harming myself. I don’t mean anything as dramatic as trying to kill myself; I don’t think I am courageous enough for that, or ever could be, even in a situation that merited it. Ending one’s own life seems to involve a grandeur of scale, somehow, however despicable or cowardly the reasons for wanting to. No, that night I thought about inflicting pain on myself. In the empty kitchen the knives in the drawer shone with a dangerous glamour and I wanted to know if self-harming worked, if the infliction of doses of pain to the outside of the body could lessen the anguish on the inside, however momentarily.
I could not erase from my mind the memory of the pain I had seen in Lucas’s face. My room felt like a stifling prison, the air rank with thoughts of what I had done. Every avenue I pursued to try to excuse what had happened offered me a dead end. I tried telling myself that it was just a kiss, nothing more, that the whole thing had been blown out of proportion, but I knew it wasn’t true. The kiss was the culmination of weeks of watching Greg and wanting him, wanting to know what it was like to be with him, to sleep with him. To cheat on Lucas. I wept silently for fear that Martha would hear and judge me undeserving of any tears for myself. The hands on my alarm clock moved later and later into the night but it was pointless even trying to sleep.
In the end I left the house and walked. It was hours past midnight and London showed me its nocturnal face, turning familiar streets into a chilly alien landscape. The shops were battened against the night, the grilles locked down over the front of the newsagent’s and the shop across the road that handled money transfers and the transport of packages to Poland and Eastern Europe. The streetlamps lit dirty canyons between rundown houses, grubby net curtains like restless spirits at the windows on the ground-floor flats of the council blocks up the Dawes Road. Every sound, every rush of litter along the gutter or rustle in the scrubby growth in the tiny front gardens was magnified and yet I walked on.
I saw almost no one. Those I did passed me in cars or on the occasional bus, looking out with dull eyes from the safe yellow light. I reached Putney Bridge and stood at the parapet facing upstream, watching the black water underneath. The Thames. Here the river moved quickly along the final miles of its journey, anxious for the sea, but it had come from Oxfordshire, its meander slower there, as though it were reluctant to leave those pleasanter banks behind. I’m not sure how long I stood there: twenty minutes, maybe half an hour. When the cold of the wind began to bite, I turned home.
At the foot of the bridge where Fulham High Street starts in its architectural mishmash of church and office block and the concrete monstrosity of the Travelodge, I felt someone watching me. It was a man by the gates to the park, partially hidden by the stone pillar, coat drawn tight around him as if he were concealing some dangerous or precious object inside it. He was too far from the stop to be waiting for the night bus. I avoided his eyes, and he mine, until I passed him and I felt his gaze dart on to my face like the flicking of a tongue. I walked on, waiting for him to follow me, to catch at my coat, but there were no quickening footsteps, no shadow running to overlap mine on the pavement. When I got home I stood in the kitchen again and felt my pulse as it slowed. It had been a stupid thing to do but I had needed it. It was a trial: I had offered myself up to whatever fate might befall a woman walking alone in a big city in the small hours of the morning. I had dared whatever was out there to come and take me if I deserved it.
I was an exile in my own home. I could not face Martha and, if I had, I doubt she would have spoken to me. We negotiated the communal areas of the house like a sort of no man’s land; I would not come out of my room until I was sure that she was in hers or was in the bathroom with the door locked. Any sound of unexpected movement was enough to send me scuttling back in fear.
On Sunday afternoon I heard her go out. I waited for five minutes in case she’d forgotten something and had to come back for it, as she often did, and then I rang my parents. Since Christmas I had spent so much time with Lucas and at Stoneborough that I had neglected them. Our conversations had been getting shorter and shorter and I felt as if I hadn’t talked properly to my mother since I was at home for the holiday. I was desperate to speak to her now, to tell her that Lucas and I had split up and to hear a sympathetic voice.
The phone rang for a long time. The cold of the night before was gone, its legacy one of those tricksy spring days that seem to presage summer with a persuasive heat at midday but turn bitter later on. I guessed my parents would be outside making the most of the sun, Mum gardening and Dad reading the paper at the table on the patio, hoping not to be roped in to any manual labour. Eventually, just as I was about to give up, my mother answered. ‘Jo, lovely to hear from you. Let me just take my gloves off. I’ve been pruning.’ Even her voice was a balm, making me feel less alone in seconds. ‘There we are. How are you? Are you in the country with Lucas?’
‘Mum, we’ve broken up.’
‘Oh no, what happened?’ She was genuinely upset.
I said as little as I could. I told her that I had begun to have doubts about him, that they had come to a head and we had split up. I couldn’t tell her about Greg. She was a fierce believer in proper conduct and would find it an unacceptable blurring of lines.
‘That must have been quite a shock for him,’ she said, when I finished my account. ‘I wondered whether he thought you might get married. After all, you’ve been close for an awfully long time.’
Her response surprised me. ‘You’re supposed to be on my side.’
‘Yes, of course, darling, but poor Lucas. It’s a shame. He was a kind soul, I always had the impression. Thoughtful, even at university. Is there any chance … ?’
‘No. None.’
‘Oh.’
I had been too abrupt. ‘Mum, it’s not just that. There were things against us.’
‘Like what?’
I couldn’t tell her about the strange atmosphere at the house – it would sound ridiculous. ‘Well, Danny. He wouldn’t accept that Lucas and I were together. I think he’s trying to force me out of Lucas’s life so that he can have him to himself.’
My mother laughed. ‘Jo, don’t be so melodramatic. I’m sure that’s not true; why on earth would Danny want to do that? He’s got his own life to live. But look, darling’ – her voice turned serious again – ‘don’t do anything rash as far as Lucas is concerned. He’s a good man. I really did think …’
I felt a flash of temper. ‘Is Dad there?’ I asked, rather than risk shouting at her. I knew myself well enough to know that when I was overwrought I couldn’t always keep my cool, even with innocent parties.
She handed the phone straight over. My father had clearly been standing next to her. ‘So you’ve split up with Lucas,’ he said. ‘What happened? Couldn’t you make it work?’
I wanted his support and affection so badly then and his immediate assumption that it had been due to my lack of effort cut me. ‘Sometimes things just don’t work out, Dad.’
‘Relationships are complicated,’ he said. ‘But I would have thought you and Lucas had enough there to make a go of it.’
‘Look, I feel bad about it – can’t you tell? Please don’t make me feel worse.’ I tried not to get angry. I couldn’t understand why neither of them seemed willing to give me a sympathetic ear. I had been relying on them as my last source of potential comfort.
‘I’m just trying to understand, that’s all. I’m your father. I’m supposed to take an interest in your life.’ There was a hint of anger in his voice now.
‘It’s not all my fault.’
‘So tell me what happened. I’m just trying to help, Joanna.’
‘I don’t need help. We’re not going to get back together, OK? Just leave it, Dad.’ I couldn’t tell them that Lucas had attacked me, although part of me wanted to, just to shock them into seeing my side. It felt like too gross a betrayal, though. Telling them would only make me feel that I had let him down in yet another way.
‘Well, you’re obviously upset and finding it difficult to be polite either to your mother or me so I’m going to hang up and we’ll speak again when you’re in a better mood.’
‘Dad, please listen …’
‘Goodbye, Jo.’ There was the fumbling sound of him replacing the handset and then I was left with nothing.
Those were some of the loneliest days I had ever spent. Just the absence of my best friends would have been enough to make them so but in addition I felt that there was a monumental new wall between us, one that I had built and now could never scale. I was on one side of it, the Elysian fields of our former friendship on the other. Even if Lucas and Rachel were not happy now, they weren’t barred from being happy again, as I now was, proven unworthy of those closest to me. The future yawned open in front of me, empty.
Without Lucas and Martha, my warp and weft, I saw how thin the rest of my life was. I would have given anything to go back. Now when I reflected on how things had been between Lucas and me, I couldn’t see what had been so wrong. I wondered why I hadn’t been able to handle Danny. I should have laughed it off, not given him the satisfaction. I had allowed him to work on the few insignificant grains of doubt I had – surely normal at the beginning of any relationship, let alone one that had started like ours – until he had undermined everything we could have had. How could I have been so stupid?
The only familiar structure left to me was work and there was no respite there, either. Although I tried to disguise it with make-up, which soon wore off, it must have been apparent to everyone in the office that I was having a bad time. No one even asked if I was OK. To get through it, I measured out each day into sections, morning, lunchtime and afternoon, and I punctuated each with as many cigarette breaks as I could get away with, and as many trips to the loo and rounds of coffee as possible, anything to avoid sitting at my desk with my thoughts and the inbox empty of any communication from the others.
I ate junk food on my way home – chips, noodles, sandwiches from the twenty-four-hour store – to avoid risking a confrontation with Martha in the kitchen. Up in my room, I cried and ploughed my way through still more cigarettes and a stack of American crime novels, my usual comfort reading, each plot disappearing from my head as soon as I’d finished it, all becoming part of some great churning morass of bodies and damaged detectives and wasted lives.
And Greg didn’t contact me.
I don’t know what I had expected. When I tried to remember how I thought it might have worked out, I drew a blank. With each day that passed the idea of us getting together seemed more and more outlandish, something I had constructed out of drunken wishful thinking and a crazily overgrown teenage fantasy. How could someone like him choose me over Rachel? Why would anyone choose me over Rachel? I was being punished now for my hubris in ever entertaining the thought. What had happened on the terrace that evening had been nothing but an illusion, an insidious trompe l’oeil which, when examined, resolved into two dimensions and left me with a sense only of having been cheated. When I thought about it, nothing after we returned inside showed he meant anything he said at all. He hadn’t even looked back as he’d gone up the stairs. I despised myself for being such a fool.
I did consider calling him but I couldn’t risk further humiliation. I had his number on the old group emails I read over and over again but if he didn’t want me then I would not pursue him. Nonetheless, there were long periods in the office when my mind wandered completely away from whatever tedious piece I was supposed to be working on and instead fabricated reasons for calling him: I was worried about Rachel; I wanted to apologise for the chaos I had caused. But I knew these ideas for what they were: phantom roads that, if followed, led to nowhere but further unhappiness.
As the week passed and the next one began, I knew for certain that I had made a terrible mistake. I came to see that all that had happened at Stoneborough Manor was the result of the strange heightened atmosphere of the place. I cursed the house for wrecking what I had with Lucas and deluding me into thinking that Greg might ever be interested in me. Back in the real world, everything that had happened at the house evaporated like rainwater from a shallow puddle.