Trick of the Dark (14 page)

'Well, duh. I got that much. What I'm trying to get at . . . is it that you're a lesbian and you've always been a lesbian only you were in denial, or is it just Jay?'

Magda felt like there was a stone in her stomach. Why couldn't she just get on with living her life? Why did she have to explain herself to anybody? Even as she had the thought, she knew the answer. Because she was the eldest. Because her life had never been her own. Because she'd grown up with three younger siblings who always wanted to know the why of everything. She'd grown accustomed to answering and they'd grown accustomed to being answered and now it felt like a divine right. 'I think I've always been a lesbian,' she said slowly. 'But I didn't want to admit it. Least of all to myself.'

'Why not? This is the twenty-first century, Mag. You can even get married now.'

'It took a long time to dawn on me, Wheelie. You know what it's like when you're a teenager, everybody has crushes on teachers, on other girls, on actresses, whatever. So there's nothing odd about being in love with your best friend except that the unwritten rule is that you don't talk about it. You have sleepovers and you snuggle and you talk till dawn but you never talk about any feelings you have for each other. And then you all start going out with boys, and it's what you do. You go with the flow. And you still feel the same about your best friend, only now it's clear you absolutely don't talk about it.' Magda ran into the sand, uncertain where to go next.

'Well, yeah. OK. Except the bit about still feeling the same. I stopped feeling like that when I started kissing boys.'

Magda gave a wry smile that twisted her beauty into something darker. 'Now, I get that. Back then, I didn't. I thought that was just how it was. And I was lucky. The boys I went out with were decent blokes.'

'Probably because you're beautiful so you got the pick of them,' Catherine butted in, pulling a sad clown face.

'Whatever. All I knew was they didn't make my chest hurt like girls did. They didn't make me breathe faster or count the hours till I would see them again. But they treated me well enough and I didn't dislike their company. It was easier just to go with the flow, Wheelie.' She pushed a stray strand of hair away from her face and checked her mirrors before moving over a lane.

'Why did you care so much about going with the flow?'

'Oh God . . . All sorts of reasons. I wanted to be a doctor working with children. I was too wrapped up in my work to be arsed with anything emotionally complicated. I didn't want to rock the boat at home. Things have been so grisly between Mum and Dad for so long, I couldn't bear the thought of throwing them another bone to fight over. And I was always supposed to be the one who was the good example. I didn't want to turn into the outcast, Wheelie.' She sighed. 'It all sounds really stupid now, but it was important at the time.'

'So you married Philip to keep everything sweet?' Catherine sounded incredulous. Magda couldn't blame her.

'It wasn't that cold-blooded,' she protested. 'I thought I loved him. I was genuinely fond of him, Wheelie. We had fun together. I liked being with him.'

'What about the sex? Didn't you
notice
you didn't fancy him? More to the point, didn't
he
notice?'

Magda winced. 'Straight for the jugular as usual. Look, the sex was fine. I'm not going into details, because it's none of your business. I got married to Philip with my eyes open. I knew I could make it work between us. It really didn't matter to me that it wasn't some earth-shattering grand passion. Frankly, I thought that kind of thing was overrated, judging by the mess most of my friends have made of it.'

Catherine let out a low whistle. 'And then you met Jay.' She laughed in delight. 'And she's turned you inside out and upside down. The gods are having their fun with you now, Mag. You've got your grand passion in spades.'

'Fuck you, Wheelie,' Magda said without rancour. 'Now it's my turn to ask you a question.'

Catherine raised her eyebrows. 'Fire away, sis.'

'Given you have no boundaries at all when it comes to other people's privacy, how come it's taken you so long to ask me the question?'

3

J
ay smiled to herself. She'd learned from her first memoir that the closer she stuck to the structure of a novel, the more her readers would be drawn in. Cliff-hanging chapter endings and hints of what was to come, that was what kept the reader glued to the book. She'd been reluctant to revisit some parts of her past, but now she was getting into her stride, she was finding it surprisingly satisfying to see it take shape. And with the trial over, she found her focus was much stronger. Clearly, she'd been more stressed by what had been happening in court than she liked to admit to herself.

Acknowledging that made her wonder whether she'd had any understanding of her stress levels when Jess had died. At the time, she'd just kept her head down and done what she had to do. Thinking about it now, it must have had more of an impact than she'd realised. It was worth bearing that in mind as she wrote the next section. It wouldn't hurt to show a little vulnerability, a hint of grappling with grief.

I was eating breakfast alone in the dining hall when I heard the news. In spite of Jess's cruel barb, Louise and I had made a point of never coming in to breakfast together, though generally one would join the other as she was finishing her toast and coffee. But that morning, Louise hadn't appeared yet. I was sitting with a view of the entrance; after her threats of the previous morning, the last thing I wanted was Jess creeping up on me.

The news started as a murmur and gasp at the far end of the room, generated by the arrival of a handful of dishevelled rowers. They were normally among the first in to breakfast, desperate for calories to replace those they'd just used up in their early-morning exertions on the river. But today, they were late. And Jess was not among them.

The report snaked up and down the refectory tables, knots of people forming in the aisles. 'Jess Edwards is dead,' I eventually heard someone say in shocked and amazed tones a couple of seats from me. I dropped my fork with a clatter.

'Jess?' I exclaimed. 'Jess Edwards?'

'Yeah,' the woman who had just sat down diagonally opposite me confirmed. `I just heard, at the serving hatch.' She jerked her head towards the rowers, now sitting hunched over cups of coffee, their shoulders angled to make themselves a self-contained group. 'They found her.'

'That's awful! What happened?' someone else demanded before I could ask the same thing.

'Nobody knows yet,' our informant said. 'They found her in the river. Face down. At the end of the meadow, by the boathouse. She was caught up in one of the willows. They were just launching the boat this morning when one of them saw her legs.'

'Oh my God. That must have been horrendous. I can't believe it,' I said, almost to myself. A complicated mix of emotions was swirling through me. I was appalled by the death of one of my contemporaries. No matter how difficult things had been between us, Jess was someone at the same point in her life as I was, and I was alive to the terrible tragedy of her death. But I'd be dishonest if I didn't admit to a sense of relief. Jess was dead but I was safe. Even if Jess's cohorts knew about the plan for the smear campaign, her death would thrust them into far too much disarray to capitalise on it.

I pushed my chair back with a screech of wood on wood and stood up. 'I just can't take it in,' I said, walking out of the dining hall like a woman in a dream.

Inevitably, my feet took me out of the Sackville Building and into the misty gardens. I scrambled down the rockery steps to the river bank and walked slowly towards the meadow. I didn't have to go far before I could see an area taped off and the dark shapes of police officers standing around by the boathouse. It was real. Jess was dead. She had been one of the golden girls of my generation, and now it was all over for her.

An event like that can be a defining moment for the group touched by it. I won't pretend we were friends, but the memory of Jess Edwards rises up before me several times a year. Every University Boat Race, I think of her leading the college boat to victory. Whenever I watch young athletes, I remember the strength and beauty of her body. I regret the loss of promise, and I wonder what she would have made of her life. I look at the lives of the other golden girls and remind myself that most of them haven't done anything spectacular, as if that were some sort of consolation. It isn't, of course.

Was that the right note? The trick was to appear candid without actually indulging in candour. Jay knew that absolute honesty was a complete non-starter, not just for her but for anyone engaging in an enterprise like this. The truth was she'd been bloody glad when Jess Edwards had died. It had suited her at the time and even now she didn't think the world was any the poorer for the absence of another over-privileged Tory bitch with an overdeveloped sense of entitlement.

And that was an impossible thing to say. Maybe the structures of fiction were working so well for her because that was what she was really writing.

By dinner, the word was all over college. It looked as if Jess had gone down to the boathouse earlier than usual. According to one of her fellow oarswomen, she'd been complaining that her seat wasn't sliding freely enough, so the supposition was that she'd gone down to do something technical to it. It had been damp and misty, the ground underfoot slippery and muddy. Jess appeared to have lost her footing on the landing stage, hit her head on the edge of the jetty and tumbled unconscious into the water, where she'd drowned. A tragic accident, the consensus said, a verdict echoed in due course by the coroner. For my part, I promised my first task as JCR President would be to insist the college laid a non-slip surface on the landing stage. It was too little, too late, but it was the best thing I could do to honour her memory.

Because there was nothing to stop me becoming JCR President now.There were a couple of other candidates, but in truth, it had been a two-horse race between me and Jess. The election three days later was a walkover.There had been some murmurings about postponing it until after Jess's funeral, but tradition has always been a powerful argument in an Oxford college. And besides, the incumbent was determined to give up office at the end of term so she could concentrate on working for her finals. Her reminder that Jess cared about St Scholastika's and that she wouldn't have wanted her death to interfere with the proper running of the Junior Common Room was enough to make sure everything ran to the appropriate timetable.

So it was as President-Elect of the JCR that I contributed to Jess's funeral. I spoke about the importance of difference, the need for opposition so that ideas could be tested. I recalled Jess's wholehearted commitment to everything she did and how much we would miss her. And it came from the heart, even surprising me a little with its power. People who were in St Mary the Virgin that day remembered my address for years, or so they told me when they bumped into me at college celebrations or in real life.

Jay stood up and walked away from the computer. The next section would have to be perfectly poised and she wanted to think it through before she tried to put pen to paper. Once, she would have gone to a climbing wall and let her subconscious mind do the work while she was intent on putting together a sequence of hand- and footholds that would take her to the top of the wall with a degree of panache. These days, that was beyond her. The injuries she'd sustained in the incident that had claimed the life of her business partner, Kathy Lipson, hadn't seemed too bad at the time. Just torn ligaments in one knee, stiffness from the cold, a painful twist in the lower back. No big deal. But as the years had slipped away, it had become clear that the damage had plugged into genetic neurological predispositions. Her fingers lacked the strength to grip, her knees no longer wanted to crab across rock faces, her toes cramped in cracks. She was a liability on a mountain, bereft of the one physical activity she'd ever found any point in.

Now, she walked. There was no challenge in it, but there was rhythm and rhythm made her mind work. She loved to walk by the Thames, the river on one side and the traffic on the other. It was where she constructed business plans, resolved problems and built strategies for dealing with people. It was also where she practised her writing, figuring out how to tell the story that was in her memory in such a way that it made sense. Shaping and reshaping, organising her material in different arrangements, transforming the untidy into a pleasing form.

The next section she would write was about Corinna and it couldn't be dodged. There was no way to write this part of the story with full weight and resonance without including what had happened between her and Magda's mother. Of course it would be easier in some ways to ignore it altogether. Whatever Jay wrote, it was going to provoke unease between the two of them. She had to negotiate a way through the truth that they could all live with. And that wasn't going to be easy.

Jay made her way through the warren of tight little streets that brought her on to the Chelsea Physic Garden. Sometimes she walked from the Chelsea Embankment to Blackfriars and beyond if she was in the grip of a particular problem. But since Magda had arrived to fill so much of her life, writing time had become even more precious. She didn't want to spend any more time away from the keyboard than she needed to.

She walked briskly along the paths, paying no real attention to what she was seeing. As she walked, she munched Cox's Orange Pippins, her jaw grinding in counterpoint to her footsteps. There had to be a way of doing this that told enough truth so that nobody would quibble while at the same time disguising the darker side of Jay's real reactions and responses.