The Art of Forgetting (19 page)

Anyway, I had him for a while. The following Saturday I was moping around the house in old, comfortable clothes. I was still feeling very sorry for myself when the phone rang and my mum called me. I couldn’t work out who it could be, as hardly anyone was speaking to me and it wasn’t likely to be Andy.

“Who is it?”

“Somebody called Nick, I think he said,” replied my mum. I didn’t know anyone called Nick and I almost told her to put him off, whoever he was. Probably some friend of a friend of Andy’s, wanting to tell me what a bitch I was. But I was halfway down the stairs and she was holding out the receiver so I took it.

“Hello?”

“Is that Judy?”

Pause whilst heart leaps then pounds, making speech difficult.

“Yes, who’s that?”

“It’s me, Vic. Can I see you, or are you, are you and Andy ...?”

Vic was a bit older than me and had been away at university, so we hadn’t moved in the same circles until Andy’s band started to get known around the town. Maybe he didn’t know we had split up. Or maybe he was testing out the water. Whatever it was, I didn’t care one bit. I told him Andy and I were finished, for good. I told him I would like to see him and we arranged to meet in town, that night. Two years of bliss I had, starting on that day and ending on a wet Friday night when a lorry demolished his little car and killed him outright. The time was ticking down from the moment I replaced the receiver and smiled for the first time in days, but I didn’t know that then. We rarely do.

As I expected it didn’t go down well, Vic and me being together, and I drifted away from the local bands scene. Vic was into what was known as progressive rock, a haughty and self-important title when I think about it. It gave us licence to look down on other kinds of music, as if they were simplistic and stuck in the past. He introduced me to bands I had never heard – sometimes never even heard of – and we used to sit in his bedroom listening to albums for hours on end, although of course that wasn’t all we did. His parents were quite old – older than most parents, anyway – and his sisters were all married with children so he was left to his own devices, more or less. We would wait until they went out then make love on his single bed, the music providing a soundtrack to our movements. There are some tracks that I know would transport me back to his room if only I could hear them. If I closed my eyes I would see his face above mine, his eyes glossy and sparkling and his hair falling like a curtain around our heads. The Strawbs, Jethro Tull, King Crimson. Nobody has even heard of them these days, but they were the soundtrack to my Vic years and I wish I could listen to them now.

It was ages before I told him about Linda. We had talked about everything, shared our thoughts and dreams in such an open way, as if we were reunited twins filling in the gaps. And yet I didn’t tell him about that one thing, not a word, not even that I’d known her. I think I was afraid that he would hate me as much as I hated myself if I told him. But one day, when we were up in his room and we were lying naked in his tangled sheets, just looking at each other in that way you do when you’re a certain age and you’re basking in a post-coital glow and you think this is it, this really must be it, because surely it can’t get any better. That’s when I told him and he didn’t hate me at all. He said whatever happened was not my fault. How could it be? It was written in the stars and there was nothing I could do to change it now so why worry about it? I should stop torturing myself and let the rest of my life take its course. That was such a compelling philosophy that I embraced it, at least at the time.

What was it that Paul said that time, his face all twisted?
“You need to start thinking for yourself and stop behaving as if you’re going out with some fucking guru.”
Something like that. I suppose there was an element of our relationship that was a bit idolatrous, on my side anyway. I’m not even sure Vic would have been aware of it, it was just the way we were, but somehow I came to depend on him for most of my views. Then when I lost him, I lost all that too, which only deepened the great, aching void in my life.

Sometimes when everyone is talking, Robin on his high horse about something in the papers, Kelly disagreeing, Laura thinking it all through quietly then saying the one thing no-one else has thought of and Patrick … well, who knows what Patrick is thinking? At times like that, I remember what it was like after Vic died, when I took the plunge and left work, went to university and started trying to build a new life. I used to sit in those smoky rooms in the halls of residence, my eyes flitting around, following this person and that as they spoke, never knowing what to say. It was ridiculous. I was a good three years older than many of them, with a lot more experience, but my compass had gone and I had to make a new one, all on my own.

So what’s happening now? I used to be able to argue with the best of them. Later, when the pain had softened and I could see a tall boy with long, brown, wavy hair across the campus without getting a momentary rush of relief – oh, there you are! – followed by the stab of realisation and the ache. When I began to understand that there were lots of boys who looked a bit like Vic from a distance but none of them would turn out to be him. Ever. When that had more or less stopped and I’d actually had a couple of brief flings with boys I didn’t really fancy because I thought I should, I slowly began to join in a bit more. Slowly, I found that some of the things I said were coming from somewhere in me, rather than from this other place, the ‘What would Vic have said?’ place that had been filtering my thoughts for so long.

That isn’t the problem now. Vic seems to be on my mind a lot at the moment but he’s not slowing my thought processes down so that I lose the thread of the discussion by the time there’s a long enough pause for me to contribute. No, that’s something else, another secret I am keeping, or at least confining to the written word. I don’t know whether they have even realised and I wonder what will happen when they do?

Anyway, none of that is relevant to Linda’s story, so I have to go back to when Vic and I had been going out for a while and it was coming up to a year since she had disappeared. First, there was a little paragraph in the local paper and now I think of it, that may have been what provoked me to tell Vic. Anyway, that isn’t important. The thing that really brought it all rushing back, unsettled me completely, was a slight change to my job. Mr Jones was apparently very pleased with me. He told me this at my review. He ticked a lot of boxes and told me why he was ticking them. I was punctual, I was conscientious, my work was of a high standard. There wasn’t a box to tick for being young and quite pretty, or for wearing skirts that barely covered your knickers, but he would have ticked those too if there had been.

The upshot was, I was getting through my work so quickly that he wanted me to take on some from another department. These documents would be for established practices and equipment rather than research, but he was sure I could manage quite well. I would have to liaise with someone from the other department in order to let them know when I had capacity, so they could let me know when they had work they couldn’t cover. It wasn’t rocket science, but Mr Jones was old school civil service and liked everything to be orderly. He asked me to arrange for the person in charge to come over one afternoon, so he could meet her and we could discuss the work. Looking back, I suspect there was a degree of empire-building going on but I knew nothing about that at the time and agreed to make the call as soon as possible. My new contact’s name was Kristal Schneider and I thought she sounded both sophisticated and mysterious. Why couldn’t I have been called Kristal Schneider instead of Judy Bakewell?

I spoke to Kristal three times on the phone before we met, and with each call my awe and expectation increased. She had a deep, almost husky voice which put me in mind of Marianne Faithful and she was at once friendly and aloof. This meant I could never be sure how to frame my responses. I worried about being too familiar, but then she would say something quite unexpected, and I would worry that I hadn’t been friendly enough. By the time the day of our meeting arrived, I had a perfectly fixed picture of her in my mind and I didn’t think for a moment that it might be wrong. She would be blonde, obviously – with a name like that she must be of Germanic origin – tall, willowy and stylish in a grown-up way. She would probably smoke some kind of exotic cigarettes; Gauloise or those little Black Russian ones, and maybe even use a cigarette holder. I was a little unsure on the last point, as that could be a bit too James Bond for a Civil Service Executive Officer – for that is what she was, a grade above me – but on everything else I was certain.

It didn’t even occur to me that the thick-set young woman in a sensible skirt and patterned blouse could be Kristal. Her hair was dark and glossy and fell in a sort of Mary Quant bob, and she didn’t look remotely Germanic. I hardly looked up from my work as she walked across to talk to Mr Jones. It wasn’t until they approached my desk together, with that ‘just about to make introductions’ look on their faces, that the penny dropped and I had to hide my disappointment and embarrassment.

In the event, it didn’t really matter. As soon as she spoke and I had reconfigured this new picture to match the voice, it was as if we had already met. Mr Jones only waited around for a couple of minutes before locating a chair and dragging it across so Kristal could sit beside me at my desk, before going off on his rounds. One of his many responsibilities was the provision of furniture throughout the building and he would use this as an excuse to wander from office to office, noting the number of chairs and desks in a little book. He took me with him more than once and I had to stand, trying to look interested, whilst he discussed cricket with every departmental manager and exchanged banter with the women. These days, he probably would have been disciplined for sexist remarks, but nobody thought twice about it then.

It didn’t take long for Kristal and I to work out a system. I showed her what I was working on at the time, which seemed to impress her. We appeared to have covered everything when she suddenly struck her thigh with the heel of her hand.

“I know who you are!” she said, as if it had been troubling her. “You’re Linda Lucaretti’s friend, aren’t you? I knew I’d heard the name before, as soon as you called, but I couldn’t work out where!”

By then my response was practically automatic. Yes, we had been friendly for a bit and travelled together, but not by the time she went missing. Yes, terrible, isn’t it? Whatever could have happened to her? And so on. I never would have put Kristal down as a gossip, but it seems my assessment of character was just as poor as my ability to create an accurate mental image. She pulled her chair a little closer and lowered her head and her voice, although there was nobody close enough to hear anything she said.

“She worked in the office on the floor below mine, you know. I didn’t know her well – she wasn’t in my team and her work, well, she was just a clerk really. Pretty routine stuff, so I didn’t have anything to do with her in that way, but my friend Dawn works in the same office and we used to sit together in the canteen from time to time. She’d come and join us – if she didn’t have a date, of course.”

This last was said with a degree of emphasis that implied something, but I wasn’t sure what. I also wasn’t sure where this conversation was heading and was very doubtful about whether I wanted it to continue, but my lack of enthusiasm was no deterrent to Kristal.

“Yes, I’m afraid we used to hear all about her lunch dates. It was as if she was doing us a favour being there at all. ‘Oh, I’m only here because my date had to go to a lecture. He’s a student, you know.’ Well of course we bloody knew, she’d told us enough times. You’d think she was going out with bloody Prince Charles to hear her talk, and honestly, the secrecy! She wouldn’t tell us his name – not that I cared much anyway – said it was something to do with his family who were something important and they’d stop paying his rent if they found out. She said it made it all the more exciting, called herself his ‘secret lover.’ She would sometimes sing that song, you know, Kathy Kirby was it? To be honest, it was all very tedious and if we saw her coming we’d start humming it too, under our breath. And then she’d look surprised and ask what we were laughing about, but she never thought it was her. Oh, no. She was far too full of herself for that.”

I had to say something, after a speech that long and so full of obvious dislike, but I didn’t want to confirm Kristal’s assessment of Linda. OK, she was very confident, especially about her own attractiveness, but I guess I would be if I’d looked like that. And Kristal, well, she was even further removed from that ideal than me, so I was pretty sure that jealousy was a significant factor here, but I could hardly say that either.

“She was quite nice to me, especially at first,” I ventured. I told Kristal about how Linda had taken me under her wing, exaggerating my own naivety and the role she had played in getting me through those first few weeks. But Kristal was not to be diverted from her mission. I doubt it would have made any difference if I’d told her Linda spent her weekends doing voluntary work with the sick and the needy.

“Oh well, she would, wouldn’t she? Any opportunity to lord it over someone else. Anyway, the point is, she was obviously having a relationship with someone, and he obviously wanted to keep it quiet, and then – and this is what Dawn told me, so it comes from someone who saw her every weekday, right up to the day she disappeared – she thinks she was up the duff.”

Kristal looked across at me, and obviously mistook my expression for confusion, rather than total shock, which it was.