Tim was a good cook. She was a lousy cook. Tim was generous, too, more than happy to get in from a late appointment showing spoiled clients round a mansion thirty miles away, drive back in terrible traffic, and immediately prepare supper including a starter. Tonight, he had made a dish of cold prawns, smoked salmon and gem lettuce with his own recipe French dressing, a chicken breast curry with almonds, and brought out some of the marmalade ice cream he had concocted the previous weekend. Shelley had managed most of the fish, by dint of taking very small pieces into her mouth and washing them down with her wine, but when he had set down the curry, one of her favourite dishes, her throat seemed to have closed and been stitched up and she could not swallow any of it. Tim was easy-going, did not take offence, looked sympathetic.
‘You haven’t picked up that damn tummy bug everyone and his wife have had? Poor Shell – if so, go to bed, I’ll bring you some iced water and you can just try and sleep it off.’
It was not a bug. Her stomach was as it had been for the past nine days – churning, nauseous, unable to digest food, but not because of any virus.
‘I’m sorry – it’s always so delicious. You are good.’
‘Go on – bed.’
‘No … Tim, I haven’t got a bug.’
He put the plates together and took them into the kitchen. Then he sat down at the table again.
‘You know.’
‘This stuff about Richard Serrailler?’
‘Stuff. Yes, if you like, call it “stuff”. He raped me.’
‘Darling, you know what I –’
‘“Darling, you know what I” … You know what I said, Tim. He raped me. Not possibly, not maybe I was drunk, not perhaps it was consensual sex. Rape!’
Tim reached out and offered to refill her wine glass but she put her hand over it.
‘What’s wrong with you that for some reason you can’t – won’t – believe me? I know there are men who stand up for their mates when the mates have had “a bit of you know what” where they shouldn’t, but you are not that kind of man … I have never, ever said this sort of thing before, have I?’
‘Of course not.’
‘No. So why would I suddenly invent a story about being raped in a hotel cloakroom?’
‘I didn’t say you had.’
‘More or less. You said I was imagining it, you said I’d had too many glasses of wine and maybe invited it … you said …’
‘No, no, Shelley, I didn’t. It’s only that – well, “rape.” … it’s a violent word.’
‘It was a violent act. I felt like a tart in an alleyway and I am not. I am so not. And even if I had been, tarts can be raped too, did you know that?’
‘Of course they can’t.’
‘Tim, they can. They can. Just because of what they do –’
‘Precisely because of what they do.’
‘If you’d heard what …’
‘What? Heard what? When?’
She looked at her hand, moving about on the edge of the table, twitching, not in her control.
‘Shelley, tell me. If you want me to take this seriously, you can’t just sit there.’
She sat there. Tim looked distraught but she felt removed from it, locked in her resolve not to be dismissed, patronised, disbelieved or talked out of what she knew was the truth.
‘Listen, if you say that is what happened then I believe you, of course I do. I’ll have a word with Serrailler – well, obviously –’
‘Excuse me, you will what? “Have a word”? What the hell does that mean? “Listen, old boy, I hear things got a bit out of hand the other night, you know what I mean – Shelley’s a bit upset, to be frank, so I thought I’d have a word, between ourselves, Mason to Mason.”’
‘Don’t joke about it.’
‘Well it sounded like a joke to me. “Have a word.”’
‘Well, what else can I do? It’s over with but he shouldn’t just walk away without getting some sort of reprimand.’
‘Oh, don’t worry, he isn’t going to. He’s not walking anywhere.’
‘What do you mean? Shelley, you mustn’t go to the police. I said this before. You’ll only show yourself up, make yourself look a fool. They’re not very nice to women who cry rape, you know.’
‘Actually, they were very nice. Extremely nice. Sympathetic and understanding and entirely …’
Tim’s eyes widened. ‘Tell me I have this wrong.’
‘You don’t.’
He got up and walked round and round the room, banging his right fist into his left palm. ‘I don’t believe this. I don’t believe it. What am I going to do?’
‘You?’
‘Yes, me. You know this will be all over Lafferton, don’t you?’ He stopped beside her and bent down, leaning his arms on the table, his face close to hers. Have you thought what effect this could have on my career? On Richard’s reputation? Has it crossed your mind in your headlong pursuit of revenge –’
She stood up so fast she knocked the chair over and it caught him on the shin.
‘This has nothing to do with revenge, this has everything to do with a man being brought to book for raping a woman. That’s all and if it gets headlines on the front page not only don’t I care, I’ll be glad, because men like that think they’re immune – you’ll “have a word” and that’s it, “naughty boy, but never mind, it won’t go any further”. But it is going further. It already has.’