‘Bloody mental,’ hissed Ara from the shadows. ‘I can see what he meant now.’
It was a cheap shot and aimed wide. I daresay Eddy said a lot of things about me to engage her sympathy. I wondered if he’d told her we didn’t sleep together any more? Part of me now really wanted to ask her. Isn’t that what married men always say?
I blew them a kiss as the door slammed shut, abandoning me in her fussy garden, which someone else was clearly paid to look after.
But by the time I got back to the car, my triumph was looking exactly like the sordid, mortifying encounter I’d promised myself from the very beginning that I would move heaven and earth to avoid. God, what did I say to her? Why was I like that? What did I hope to achieve? And anyway, selfish and heartless as she was, Arabella had never stood up in the pergola in an overpriced country hotel in a rented morning suit and promised to love me all the days of my life. I could call her all the names I wanted, but it changed nothing. Ultimately, this was Eddy’s fault. He was the traitor.
I curled up in the front seat of the Audi and wept, not with grief, but in a kind of bitter, gnashing rage and embarrassment. At first, when Eddy left, when I wept at all, it was mostly through shock, as though I was in some liminal state that it would be easy to reverse, a bizarre mistake. He was going to come home, obviously. This was something we were going to work out.
I applied the scrunched-up napkins stuffed into the driver’s door to my face, happy I had not made myself up that day. I needed to get to school, but I just wanted to howl and howl.
So this was love, apparently.
I would be better off teaching the kids about this, rather than To Kill a Mockingbird. It would be of much more use to them in the future.
The night before I was due to meet Martin Forrester, as I lay wide awake in bed, it struck me that I should cancel my appointment with him. Why did I want to talk to anyone about this? Why couldn’t I just post him the letters? In the cold hours before dawn it seemed an increasingly gloomy, ghoulish errand to run, and I did not want to talk about Bethan Avery’s suffering face to face with anyone.
Why did he want to meet me? How had he known about the school?
The prospect of engaging any further with this filled me with increasing unease. I should forget about Bethan Avery and make an attempt to save my marriage, to move past my humiliation and anger, to try to see things from Eddy’s point of view. The alarm clock by my head said it was three in the morning.
Where was Eddy now?
Where was Bethan Avery now?
Was I a victim of a hoax in a way that its perpetrator never dreamed of?
One picture of her stood out in my mind. It was in Moore’s book and it was the very first one. She is in it, sitting on a white pony at the seaside. Her grandmother, Peggy, is holding the reins, looking up at her, grinning with pride. She was a big, jovial-looking woman with stained teeth. Bethan glanced askance at the camera, smiling shyly, her head turned away a little. Her eyes are huge and very dark, and her long locks hang over her small face. Her hands are knitted tightly into the horse’s mane. Perhaps she was scared of falling off. But she wasn’t the most interesting thing in the photo. Peggy was. The unfeigned expression on her face lit the picture with joy.
And I, who can be eaten up with jealousy, could search out this picture again and again and look at it – and at her – I who can’t stand an even vaguely sentimental film, can take in all this, this feast of love, again and again.
Perhaps it’s because I know it will all end so badly for this lost girl. That’s rather in my character, I’m afraid to say. But maybe not this time.
Maybe… she wouldn’t be a girl any more, but she might be alive. That dark orphan, that dreamchild, that lost Persephone, might call to me across the decades yet, to be a mother to her, to be a mother to my own selfish self. And that’s why I had to see it through.
I lay there a couple of hours longer, turning it all over in my mind. When the alarm clock flicked to five I rose silently and dressed for a run. Sleep was impossible, so I might as well seize this quiet, cold, magic hour.
I let myself out into the dark morning and allowed the breeze and the birdsong to blow away my doubts as I pounded down the drowsy roads. I was on a quest to save my cold and troubled soul, and tossing and turning through the dark night, I had realized how important it was that I succeed.
6
‘You must be Margot.’ He got to his feet, extended his hand. ‘How d’you do?’
I had cycled into work today, as the weather had held its bright, sharp sunshine. I feel a constant nagging guilt that I don’t do this more often, a sort of moral toothache. It would be good for the environment. It would be good for me. Cambridge, everybody will tell you, has cycling built into its very DNA.
I cycled everywhere once – when I was a student here, naturally, as even those who could afford them were forbidden cars in college, and then for years afterwards I would keep cars I only ever drove when shopping for groceries or when the weather rendered the bicycle too purgatorial to consider.
Then I married Eddy, who is much more a Porsche than a Raleigh man, and increasingly I found myself following suit as we dropped one another off and picked one another up – which was fine, as we were car-pooling, which made us less obviously ecological terrorists, but then before long I was driving in expecting to pick Eddy up, either from the Metallurgical Sciences department in West Cambridge or the Sensitall Labs out in the Science Park, and he was cancelling on me, leaving me to go home alone as he ‘worked through the night’.
Worked through the night, indeed. I crushed down the fiery little prickle of anger and pain this consideration gave me. I am moving past this. Watch me move.
That morning, after my sleepless night, I had decided that, all things considered, it was time for me to get back on my bike, as they say – to resume my old life, my old habits, to close the yawning space that was Eddy’s absence. It would be good for discipline.
Though it did mean that when I appeared in the Copper Kettle after my brisk journey from St Hilda’s, I was windblown, shiny with sweat and sporting a bright red flush.
I recognized Martin Forrester immediately – he had obtained a table near the window for us, and he was gazing through it, seemingly oblivious to me, lost in contemplation of the delicate stone arches of Kings College until he caught sight of me self-consciously hitching my bike up to the rack outside. He offered me a wave and made a gesture both welcoming and beckoning, though he didn’t smile.
I felt as though I was being summoned to see a tutor.
I came inside, wending my way past the busy tables full of gossiping students and laughing tourists, feeling nervous and flustered. He rose to meet me and offered me a firm, warm hand. His fastidious academic dress from the image on my computer had been replaced with a slightly stubbly chin, a pair of distressed skinny jeans and a neat dark blue shirt that skimmed over surprisingly defined musculature.
And yet, despite this casual attire, there was something harder-edged about him in person, something a little dangerous. His most striking feature, one that didn’t appear in the photo, was his unsettling jade green stare, hooded under a strong forehead with thick black brows.
He waited for me to settle opposite him, summoning a waitress with a friendly nod that she quickly returned – I had the feeling they knew him in here.
‘You recognized me,’ I said, trying to hide the fact that this had unnerved me.
‘There’s a picture of you on your school website.’ He shrugged, but those intense eyes didn’t leave me, and there was something deeply calculating in them. ‘Digital spying. It’s the new black. Ops, that is.’
He smiled for the first time.