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She sees Robert check his watch. He has to be in early.

‘I’ll be quick, I’ll be quick,’ she says, running into the kitchen, filling a bottle of water, grabbing her iPod before running back to him. They slam the door shut, double-lock and walk together to the Tube. She reaches for his hand and holds it, and he looks at her and smiles.

‘That was fun last night,’ he says. ‘Did you get lots of nice emails?’

‘A few,’ she says, although she hadn’t bothered to check. It had been the last thing on her mind. She’ll have a look later, when she’s home, when her head is clearer. He pecks her on the cheek, tells her he shouldn’t be late home, hopes her head feels better and then disappears into the Underground. She turns round as soon as he has gone, sticking in her ear-buds and running up the road. Back the way they’d come, towards the only green space in the area. Her feet slap in time to the music.

She passes the top of their road and keeps going. Her heart is thumping, sweat is already running down between her shoulder blades. She is not fit. She should be doing a fast walk, not a run, but she needs the discomfort. She reaches the high, wrought-iron gates of the cemetery and runs through. She manages one circuit then stops, panting for breath, bending down and resting her hands on her knees. She should stretch out, but she feels too self-conscious. She is not an athlete, merely a woman on the run.

Keep going, keep going. She straightens up and sets off again, a gentle jog, not punishing, allowing thoughts to stir. As she reaches the halfway point she slows to a walk, keeping it brisk, wanting her heart to stay strong, to keep pumping. Names float out to her from the gravestones: Gladys, Albert, Eleanor, names from long ago of people long dead. But it’s the children she notices. The children whose stones she stops to read. The beginnings and ends of their short lives. Doesn’t everyone do that? Stop at the graves of the children tucked up for ever in their grassy beds? They take up less space than their grown-up neighbours and yet their presence is impossible to ignore, crying out to be looked at. Please stop for a moment. And she does. And she imagines a stone that could have been there, but isn’t.

Nicholas Ravenscroft
Born 14 January 1988, taken from us on 14 August 1993
Beloved son of Robert and Catherine

And she imagines how she would have been the one who would have had to tell Robert that Nicholas had died. And she hears his questions: Where were you? How could that have happened? How was it possible? And she would have burst open, poured everything out on to him and he would have sunk under the weight of it. She sees him struggle, pushing against it, trying to raise his head above the deluge, gasping for air but never quite getting enough to make a full recovery.

Nicholas didn’t die though. He is alive, and she didn’t have to tell Robert. They have all survived intact.

6

Two years earlier

I woke the morning after reading ‘A Special Kind of Friend’ refreshed. I was eager to start work and had planned to look through my notes before typing them up. I knew there was some paper in the dresser cupboard: everything seemed to end up either on or in our dresser. I could picture the sheaf of paper sitting beneath the games of Scrabble and Backgammon, but when I tried to pull it out, it wouldn’t come. It was trapped in the back of the dresser. A panel had been pushed in and I pressed against it, trying to release the paper; still it wouldn’t budge. Something was stuck between the dresser and the wall. I put my hand around the back and touched something soft. It was an old handbag of Nancy’s: a cunning one that had managed to evade the trip to the charity shop.

I leaned against the wall, stretching my legs in front of me with the handbag on my lap. It was black suede with two pearl drops clasped around each other. I dusted it down and looked inside. There was a set of keys to Jonathan’s flat, a lipstick and a handkerchief still pressed in a square where it had been ironed. I took the top off the lipstick and sniffed it. It had lost its scent yet kept its angled shape from the years it had stroked Nancy’s lips. I held the hanky to my nose, and its perfume conjured up memories of evenings at the theatre. What I hadn’t expected to find was the yellow envelope of photographs with Kodak in thick black lettering on the front. This was a precious find and I wanted to make an occasion of it.

I made myself some coffee and settled down on the sofa, anticipating a flood of happy memories. I assumed the pictures were holiday snaps. I think I even hoped there might be a few of the Martello tower: that finding the handbag was Nancy’s way of helping me on with my project. In a way it was, but not the one I had had in mind that morning.

My head, which had been so clear at the start of the day, felt as if the contents of someone else’s had been dumped into it. I could no longer tell which thoughts were mine and which were theirs; which ones were true and which were lies. My coffee had gone cold; the pictures were spread out on my lap. I had expected images I recognized, but I had never seen these pictures before.

She was looking straight into the camera. Flirting? I think so. Yes, she was flirting. They were colour photos. Some were taken on a beach. She was lying there, a smiling sweetheart on holiday in a red bikini. Her breasts were pushed up as if she was some sort of pin-up girl and she certainly looked as if she thought herself a very desirable woman. Confident. Yes, that’s what it was. Sexual confidence. Others were taken in a hotel room. They were shameless. She was shameless. I couldn’t look away though. I could not stop looking. I went through them again and again, tormenting myself, and the more I looked, the angrier I became because the more I looked, the more I understood.

What chewed at my heart was that I knew who had taken these pictures. I knew the handsome face behind the camera even though I couldn’t find him. I looked and looked, but no matter how many times I went through them, all I could see was his shadow caught on the edge of frame in one shot. I even went through the negatives, holding them up to the light in case there was one of him that hadn’t been developed. There were more negatives than prints and I hoped one of these might reveal him, but they were blurred, out of focus, useless.

How could Nancy have brought those photographs into our house? Hiding them from me, allowing them to sit and fester in our home. They must have been there for years. Did she forget about them? Or did she take a risk, knowing that I might come across them one day? But it was too late. By the time I did, she was dead. I would never be able to talk to her about them. She should have destroyed them. If she wasn’t going to tell me, she should have destroyed them. Instead she had left me to find them when I was a pathetic old man; long after the event; long after a time when I could have done anything about it.

One of the things I had most prized about Nancy was her honesty. How many times did she look through those pictures in private? And hide them again? I imagined her waiting for me to go out before looking through them; hiding them when I came home. Every time I took something out of the dresser, every time we played Scrabble, she knew they were there and didn’t say a word. I had always trusted her, but now I worried what else she might have hidden.

It is extraordinary how much strength anger gives one. I turned the house upside down searching for more secrets. I attacked our home as if it was the enemy. I went from room to room, ripping, spilling, tipping, making a godawful mess, but I found nothing else. The whole experience left me with the sensation that I had reached down into a blocked drain and was groping around in the sewage trying to clear it. Except there was nothing solid to get hold of. All I felt was soft filth, and it got into my skin and under my fingernails, and its stink invaded my nostrils, clinging to the hairs, soaking up into the tiny blood vessels and polluting my entire system.

7

Spring 2013

A speck of dust lands on the pillow. No one else would hear it. Catherine does. She hears everything – her ears are wide open. She sees everything too. Even in the pitch-black. Her eyes have become accustomed to it. If Robert woke now he would be blind; Catherine isn’t. She watches his closed eyes: the twitching lids, the flickering lashes, and she wonders what is going on behind them. Is he hiding anything from her? Is he as good at it as she is? He is closer to her than anyone else and yet she has managed, over all these years, to keep him in the dark. It doesn’t matter how intimate they are, he just can’t see it and she finds that thought frightening. And by keeping everything locked up for so long she has made the secret too big to let out; like a baby that has grown too large to be delivered naturally, it will have to be cut out. The act of keeping the secret a secret has almost become bigger than the secret itself.

Robert rolls on to his back and starts to snore so Catherine gently propels him on to his other side so his back is to her. Careful not to wake him – she cannot risk a conversation this deep in the night – she moves close enough so she can smell him.

She remembers the moment, twenty years ago, when he put his arm around her and said: ‘Are you OK?’ She was not OK, but she hadn’t wanted him to notice because she couldn’t tell him why and she wasn’t as good then as she is now at covering up. She had said, ‘No, not really,’ and though she had felt tears behind her eyes she stopped them from falling because she knew if they fell they would be followed by a torrent of words. If she had cried she wouldn’t have been able to stop everything else coming out. So she didn’t cry, she made a confession, but it was a false one.

‘I want to go back to work. I feel bad even saying it. I know I’m lucky having a choice to stay home, you’re earning enough for both of us, but … I’m lonely. I’m depressed …’ It was the beginning of her digging a tunnel of escape from herself – and from Nicholas too. Her son was a constant reminder, though she couldn’t tell Robert that. She couldn’t say that being on her own with Nicholas was sending her mad; that his presence threw up memories she wanted to wipe out.

‘Do you understand?’ she asked. And she remembers looking up into Robert’s eyes and wondering whether he could see through her.

‘Of course I do,’ he said, pulling her close to kiss her. Nevertheless she felt his disappointment. He tried to hide it with his kiss; he tried to cover up his regret that she had confessed herself unable to be the kind of mother he wanted for their son. He never said this, he never voiced his disappointment, all the same she knew it was there, unspoken, between them.

There was a moment when she nearly told him the truth. Instead she lied again and said that she was going to stay with an old schoolfriend for the weekend. It was a friend he didn’t know well, a friend who lived outside London; he would never find out. She told him it was an emergency – that the friend was having a breakdown. She packed a bag and left straight from work on Friday, leaving the new nanny to pick up Nicholas from school and getting away before Robert got home from work. She took a taxi, not the Tube – she didn’t want to risk bumping into anyone she knew.

When she came home on Sunday evening, Nicholas was already in bed. Robert told her she looked pale and she said it had been a pretty ghastly weekend and that she was exhausted. That was all true.

‘I need an early night, that’s all,’ she said and immediately changed the subject, asking him about the new nanny.

‘Seemed to go well. Nick was in a chirpy mood when I got home on Friday.’

‘That’s good,’ she said.

And the following morning she made sure she was fine. There was a little colour in her cheeks, and she had to get Nick ready for school before going to work so there was no time to talk, for him to notice that she was distracted. Work too was hectic. She was up to her eyes and that’s what she wanted. To be so busy that there was no room left in her head for remembering. And she succeeded in emptying her mind of the past. That was the point. That was what drove her. Now the past has elbowed its way back in, shoving everything else aside – standing there, chest puffed out, demanding her attention.

The book still lies on the table next to the bed. She can’t finish reading it. Each time she has tried, she retreats like a coward, rereading the same words, over and over – trapped in its middle. She peels away from Robert and slides out of bed, picking up the book and creeping downstairs like a burglar.

She thumps it down on the kitchen table and turns her back on it, a feeble act of rebellion. Today is Sunday, a day of rest, but not for her. She makes tea, takes it up to the spare room and sits on the floor. There are five boxes here waiting to be unpacked: two have Nicholas’s name on them; three are marked
Spare Room
. She can’t remember what’s in them. She feels light-headed from lack of sleep and her hands are shaking as she pulls things out, tearing and ripping at newspaper, unwrapping knick-knack after knickknack, all pointless, useless things. She’d hoped for a clue – a note, an envelope, anything that might be connected to the book and help her trace its route into her home – there is nothing. She tries another box. Book after book after book, which she dumps on the empty shelves, not bothering to stand them up, allowing them to slip and slide against each other, leaving some to tumble to the floor with a thump.

She eyes Nicholas’s boxes. He was supposed to have come a week ago to sort through them but he hadn’t, and she had wanted to do it for him, but Robert had stopped her. They were Nick’s things, not hers. And Catherine had been frustrated because she damn well knew that Nicholas wouldn’t do it properly. And the point was he didn’t have a bedroom here any more. What they had now was a spare room. For guests. Nicholas could come over whenever he liked. Of course he could. And if he ever wanted to spend the night, then of course he could do that too. In the spare room. He has his own flat now. Pays his own rent. And that’s good. He is twenty-five years old. He has done better than they had ever dared hope. He has a job. A routine. Independence. And that’s what Catherine wants for him. A chance to be the best he possibly can be. The rush of thoughts leaves her breathless, as if she has spoken each one out loud.