And here was Alex, living his life as though he had never veered from the straight path he intended for himself.
She clicked on the Biography page.
Alex lives with his wife in South London. When not designing he likes to indulge himself in travelling, modern-art galleries and fine wine.
She read the blurb a few times, trying to take it in. The Alex of old did indeed like travelling and art galleries, but she couldn’t remember seeing him drink wine at all.
And then there was ‘his wife’. She thought back to the pretty-featured girl at the restaurant with her light brown hair tucked casually behind her ears. Chloe had immediately made her feel stiff and formal, with her wide, welcoming smile and easy manner. Not that her relaxed posture had lasted long, once Alex had appeared.
There was an address on the website and she scribbled it on the back of her internet ticket. Then she clicked back to the search page and typed in ‘Chloe Markham’. There were a few links that were obviously irrelevant, but then one came up under lewisandmarchant.com. Going to that, she found a page containing a picture of the girl she had just conjured up in her memory. Yet in this portrait Chloe’s smile wasn’t the natural one she’d had at the restaurant, and she wore a suit jacket with a white shirt underneath as she sat straight-backed and gazed into the camera lens.
Julia read the blurb next to the photo:
Chloe Markham, solicitor, is one of Lewis & Marchant’s rising stars. Qualified for eight years, her specialty is family law, alongside general litigation.
This wasn’t the kind of information she wanted to know about Chloe. She wanted to find something that could tell her what it was about Chloe that made Alex smile. How they’d met. Where their wedding had taken place. And a million other things.
Why did he love her?
She pressed the ‘back’ button, stupidly surprised to see Mark’s face appearing before her. She clicked on his name and idly read the details set out there, noticing that he looked disdainfully handsome in his photo, but not really taking the words in.
Back at the search page, she typed in ‘Chloe and Alex Markham’ again, just in case, but there was nothing new. She flicked through pages impatiently, wanting more. On the third page that came up there were a couple of quotes from Chloe about legal cases, but nothing interesting.
While she was there, she plucked up her courage and typed in another name. She held her breath. But, as always, there was nothing.
She picked up her bag and the ticket she had scribbled on, and marched towards the door of the café, eyeing the address, trying to decide what to do. She passed a phone box and took a lingering look at it, just as she always did. Her father might be dead because of her, but she knew exactly where her mother was. She tempted herself with the uncertain promise of resolution, of redemption even, though the last time they had spoken her mother had been hysterical, threatening to disown her if she didn’t come home. She reminded herself that now her mother might have answers she couldn’t bear to know. Yet each day the desire to pick up the phone increased a little more, in proportion with the conviction that she didn’t want to be found.
So why, then, had she written down that address on Alex’s website? Was she finally admitting to herself that she needed someone who knew her Before to be in her life – a tenuous link both to who she had been and who she might have become? Or was it simply because she still loved him, despite what had happened in the end?
She had no idea. She turned away from the phone box, shook her head and moved on. She couldn’t make the call.
Back at her flat, before she was fully aware of what she was doing, she was kneeling by her rucksack – the only bag she’d arrived with a few weeks ago. She unclipped the top of it and pushed it back, to reveal a zipper hidden on the inside. She unzipped it quickly and pushed her hand into the secret compartment, groping around, pulling out one item at a time until they were all laid pitifully before her on the bedcovers.
Here were the only three things that really mattered to her.
The first was a charm on a necklace chain, like those you’d usually find on a bracelet. It was a tiny wishing well, the detail on it astounding: the gabled canopy; the tiny spindle; the coiled rope. A lot of wishes had been cast fruitlessly into the small hollow, far too many for its tiny size.
The second was a fluorescent patchwork lizard-gecko hybrid about the size of her palm, with splayed fingers and big googly eyes. Sometimes Julia would sit it on her pillow, and each protruding iris seemed to follow her round the room, until she would have to put the duvet over its head for a while just to escape the sense of being watched.
Lastly, there was a small silver box containing a cutting of short brown hair.
Although, she realised, there was a fourth item back there too. Something she hadn’t looked at for a long time. Her hand delved into the pocket again, and pulled out a crumpled piece of white paper. There were a few black smudges on there now, where the ink had run since getting wet, but most of it was still legible. She looked over it quickly – was it really ten years since she had first read these words? In the light of the past twenty-four hours it was too painful to dwell on them for long.
She placed the piece of paper next to the other items and cast her eye over them all as they lay forlornly on the bed. Each one was a reminder of who she had been, which was why there was always an inevitable pang of pain and longing whenever she looked at them. It hadn’t been as difficult as she’d thought to discard the bloodied entrails of her old life – but she didn’t seem to be able to let go of these last things. They seemed so little, but they stood for so much.
Or perhaps it was that they wouldn’t let go of her, she thought now, fingering each item tenderly, willing with everything she had for the tears to come, to show her that she could still feel something. In fact, surely seeing Alex again like that, out of the blue, had to be a sign.
That even made her smile slightly. She hadn’t realised she still believed in signs. As she looked down at her nail-bitten fingers, a thought struck her with such velocity that she heard herself gasp.
What if there had been signs all along, and she had just missed them?
8
The car in which Chloe and Alex sat in silence formed one tiny scale of the huge glittering snake that coiled around the M25 and slithered ever so slowly forwards.
They hadn’t spoken since Alex picked Chloe up from the station after work. Chloe was regretting that they had promised the weekend to her mother. On a non-travelling Friday evening they would meet at the station and spend a couple of hours in the local pub, indulging in idle chitchat with friends and neighbours they encountered there, and then head home for either a takeaway or an easy meal – pasta and salad, or something similar. They’d crack open a bottle of wine, sit companionably on the sofa, shuffling positions every now and again, limbs draped comfortably over each other’s bodies. She would perhaps put her hand up his shirt and rub the flat circle of hair on his stomach, and he would slide his hand up her blouse and cup her breasts and stroke her nipples. They’d stay that way until one of them couldn’t take it any more and made a definite move…
Had they really done that only last Friday? Just one week ago everything was normal. Just one night ago she’d sat at her dresser and stared at herself in the mirror, feeling so wonderfully thrilled with the way things were going. Twenty-four small hours later and here they were, wrapped within a leaden silence punctuated only by honking horns.
She looked across at Alex. He was grim-faced, one hand over the top of the steering wheel, the other resting on the gear stick. She had practised the first sentence – ‘Alex, about last night…’ – but she was still unsure how to follow it up.