I’d made it two strides towards the door when Madeleine called me back. There was something in her voice I couldn’t quite categorise. I turned, and sat down again with reluctance, keeping one eye on the window. When I looked down, I found she’d leaned across and placed a photograph on the table in front of me.
I picked it up. The image looked to have been taken on the deck of a boat. In the background I could see the rail and wake through the water. To the left of the shot were two people, standing wrapped in each other’s arms, smiling into the lens. Madeleine and a tall black man.
He must have been tall. Madeleine was no short-stop, but he towered over her enough to be resting his chin on top of her head. He was eye-catchingly handsome. Regal, with a brilliant smile. Happiness radiated from them.
I handed the picture back. She glanced at it with affection before slipping it into her handbag.
I knew I was supposed to ask, so I said, “Who’s the guy?” If I’m honest, I was curious, anyway.
“That’s Dominic,” Madeleine said.
Of course, he would have to be a Dominic. I just couldn’t see Madeleine with a Dave or a Darren.
“We’ve been together three years now.” She smiled, to herself more than to me. A secret kind of a smile. One that wraps you up in a blanket and keeps you warm in the winter. “I think he’s a keeper.”
“A keeper?”
“For keeps.” She looked at me and something of the smile spilled over. I didn’t doubt the strength of her feelings for him. “He’s wonderful. I’d be mad to let him go.”
I dredged my memory and came up with a distant fact that he was a chef, but I’m not entirely sure where it came from. I was at a loss to know where she was going with this sudden outbreak of palliness.
“He looks . . . very nice,” I said, lamely.
Madeleine sighed. “The point is, Charlie, that I love him, but even if I didn’t I’d be asking for trouble making a play for Sean when we work together. Besides, I’d be wasting my time. He’s not interested.”
“In you?” I asked, almost in spite of myself. “Or in having a relationship full stop?”
“Both, I think.”
A young, bored-looking waitress appeared from somewhere deep in the bowels of the café. She paused by our tables, scowling. Madeleine asked for more espresso, much to the girl’s obvious disgust. I ordered the same, just for badness. She stopped just short of tutting out loud, and sloped away again.
We didn’t speak until she’d rattled a cup down onto each table top in front of us and retreated, not bothering to remove Madeleine’s empty. Milk and sugar, it seemed, were not an option.
“You seem to know an awful lot about Sean’s private life,” I said then, taking my first sip of real caffeine for over a week. It plugged straight into my nervous system like a set of jump leads.
“I’ve worked with him since he first set up on his own. I’ll admit there was a time when I had hopes in that direction – before I met Dominic, of course,” Madeleine said, pausing to smile wryly. “One evening, not long after I’d started working there, I managed to contrive getting Sean round to my flat and cracked open a bottle of wine. I thought once he got some alcohol inside him he might loosen up a bit.” She lifted her head and glanced over at me. “Instead, all he did was talk about you.”
I said, “Oh.”
It was like one minute I’d been walking along a sunny beach without a care and the next a big black cloud had moved across the face of the sun, the tide had turned with a vengeance, and the last step I’d taken had been onto sand that felt suspiciously soft under foot. Leave now, my mind shouted at me, before it’s too late . . .
It’s not the first time I’ve thought I should listen to that voice in my head more often.
But I didn’t.
I’d said it as a statement, but Madeleine took my single word as a question. She swirled her coffee round in its cup for a moment, disturbing the sediment at the bottom, then said calmly, without looking at me, “He told me you’d spent an amazing spur-of-the-moment first weekend together in a chalet built into the side of a cliff somewhere on the Welsh coast. Said you’d spent the whole time in bed and that it was sensational.”
I felt my face heat at her dryly delivered words, but I didn’t deny any of it. There was little point when it was quite true.
The chalet had indeed been built into the side of a cliff, with a long set of winding stone steps leading down to it. They were so steep that if we’d had luggage it would have been a perilous descent, but we hadn’t thought much further ahead than the clothes we stood up in. And how fast we could get each other out of them.
I turned away so Madeleine couldn’t read the thoughts chasing through my head, and stared out of the window again. Outside I could see a couple of the students standing on the far side of the square with a map in their hands, pointing to various key points of the roof-line opposite. So much for unobtrusive observation. They couldn’t have made their purpose any plainer if they’d been wearing sandwich boards proclaiming it.
I turned back to Madeleine and picked up what was left of my own coffee. It had turned cold, and black, and bitter.
“Was that all he told you about me?” I said, with more than a touch of bite. “That I was a good lay?”
Madeleine regarded me with a level gaze, shaming my unworthy comment. “He told me you were fearless, quick, funny, clever, mentally stronger than anyone he’d ever met,” she said. “He said you were the best thing and the worst thing that had ever happened to him.”
As you were to me, Sean, I thought. As you were to me.
“He couldn’t understand how you came to betray him after what you’d shared together,” she went on, into her stride now, relentless. “He couldn’t understand how you could tell them about your affair, could claim he’d raped you, to try and save your own skin.”
“I didn’t,” I denied automatically, but without heat.
“He knows that now,” Madeleine agreed, “but he didn’t then.”
When we’d met again last winter, Sean and I had solved the mystery of just how the army had uncovered the details of our clandestine relationship. It had been a relief to find that he hadn’t, after all, abandoned me as I’d thought, but by then it had been almost too late for it to matter.
I suppose it might have cleared the air between us.
Human history is littered with might-have-beens.
I’d heard enough. I got to my feet again, throwing down enough change to cover the cost of my coffee.
This time, I almost made it to the doorway before Madeleine’s cut glass voice stopped me in my tracks.
“You’ve never told him, have you?” she said. “What really happened to you.”
I stilled like she’d just jerked a snare around my neck. I swallowed, and my imagination felt the cut of the wire into my throat. Without turning, I asked, “How much do you know?”
“All of it, more or less,” Madeleine said. “Don’t you think Sean has a right to know it, too?”
Anger lit me. I took another couple of steps towards the door and yanked it open. I gripped the handle tight, making sure I had my escape route before I glanced back towards her.
“He doesn’t have to know,” I managed through lips that seemed suddenly stiff, unyielding. “It wouldn’t do any good for him to know.”
“Why not, Charlie? It might make him understand what you went through.”
I shook my head. “No. I’d rather he thought of me as a ruthless bitch than a helpless bitch,” I bit out. “Don’t tell him, Madeleine.” In my head I’d summoned up the words as an order, a cool command, but instead they came out shaped as a plea.