I'd like to have stayed in there until spring, or until the man was caught, but I finally switched off the shower and dried myself with the slowness and attention to detail of a woman without a pressing appointment. I wandered through to Ben's bedroom and dressed myself largely in his clothes: tracksuit bottoms and a floppy blue T-shirt many sizes too big for me. And some huge football socks and a pair of slippers I found in the back of his cupboard. In the kitchen I boiled the kettle and made half a pot of coffee for myself.
One day I was going to have to start thinking about taking my career out of its current state of abeyance, but that could wait. Everything could wait.
I drank my coffee then made some half-hearted attempts at cleaning and tidying. I didn't know Ben's house well enough to do much. I didn't know what implement went into which drawer or on which hook and I wasn't keen enough to scrub the floor or anything extreme like that so I contented myself with doing the dishes, wiping surfaces, straightening out the duvet and generally putting things in neat piles. Even that took less than an hour and left me with an empty day stretching out until Ben came back. I had a chance to spend time in the way I'd always planned to but never had the time. I could flop on a sofa and drink coffee and listen to music and read and be a woman of leisure.
Women of leisure wouldn't listen to the jangly pop music that made up the bulk of my own collection. They would want something more sophisticated. I browsed through Ben's CDs until I found something that looked jazzy and mellow. I put it on. It sounded very grown-up. More like a soundtrack than something you would actually listen to, but that was fine. I was going to be reading and sipping coffee and I just wanted something in the background. The problem with having an entire day of leisure was settling on a particular book to read. I wasn't in the mood to tackle a proper serious book and there was no point in starting a big fat thriller. In fact, as I took books out of the shelves and inspected them, it quickly became clear that I wasn't quite in the mood to be an authentic woman of leisure. Despite my long shower and my empty schedule, I was still very agitated. I couldn't concentrate on anything. I couldn't stop thinking about the one thing I wanted to avoid.
Ben had a stack of photography books and I sat flicking through them, unable to settle on one in particular. I lasted the longest with a collection of photographs from the nineteenth century. There were exotic landscapes and dramatic events, battles and revolutions and disasters, but what I looked at were the faces. There were men and women and children. Some were distracted, terrified. Others were celebrating at fairs and fiestas. Sometimes a face would look round at the camera with a conspiratorial smile.
That was what struck me most. The strangeness of those faces. I thought, and I couldn't stop thinking, that all of those people, the beautiful and the ugly, the rich and the poor, the lucky and the benighted, the evil and the virtuous, the religious and the godless,
now had one thing in common: they were dead. Each of them, singly, utterly alone, in a street or on a battlefield or in a bed, had died. All of the people in that world were gone. I thought about that but I didn't just think about it. I felt it like toothache. This was part of what I had to get over. I looked at the higher shelves at the spines of the smaller books, which wouldn't have any pictures in them. Poetry. That was what I needed. I've probably only read about eight poems in the years since I left school but I suddenly felt the need to read a poem. It would also have the extra advantage of being short.
Ben obviously wasn't much of a poetry reader either but there were a few of the sort of anthologies that grandparents and godparents give you when all inspiration fails. Most of them looked too much like textbooks for me or else they were poems on subjects that didn't interest me, like the countryside or the sea or nature in general. But then my eye fell on a volume called Poems of Longing and Loss, and even though I felt like an alcoholic reaching for a bottle of vodka, I couldn't resist it. I sat with my coffee and dipped into the book. I was hardly aware of tracing the meaning of individual poems. Instead, there was a blur of grief and regret and absence and grey landscapes. It was like being at a party of depress-ives, but in a good way. Trying to pretend that I was happy and relaxed had been a mistake. It was much better to find that there were other lost souls who felt the way I did. I was among friends, and after a while I found I was smiling with recognition.
I liked the book and turned to the beginning to see who had compiled this wonderfully bleak anthology and I saw that a message had been scrawled on the title page. I experienced the tiniest flash of an impulse that it was wrong to read the message. I ignored it. It wasn't as if I had rifled through Ben's desk and found his diary or some old love letters. An inscription in a book is like a postcard that has been pinned to a wall. Even if it's addressed to a single person, it's still a sort of public declaration. At least, that's what I told myself in that fraction of a second, and when I saw the first three words of the inscription, which were "Dearest darling Ben', I began to suspect that this wasn't really a public declaration but by that time I was reading it and this is what I read: "Dearest darling Ben. Here are some sad words which are better at saying what I feel than I am myself. I am so so sorry about all this and you are probably right but I feel torn apart and terrible in different ways. And this is a hell of a message to write in a book. All of my love, Jo." It was dated November 2001.
And there wasn't even the tiniest bit of me that even tried to believe that this could be some other Jo. I had been living in Jo's flat for days and her writing was all over the place, on shopping lists, memos, on the covers of videos, and I knew it almost as well as I knew my own. I felt scalding hot all through my body, through my hands and my feet, and then I shivered uncontrollably. Fucking Ben. Fucking fucking Ben. He'd told me all about that bloody Leah. He'd been all sensitive about that relationship and how beautiful she'd been and everything, and he'd just omitted to mention the minor little detail that after he'd split up with her he just happened to have been fucking the woman whose flat I was living in, the woman who just happened to have disappeared. I thought of him casually ringing her doorbell. They were friends, it was no big deal. We had spent huge amounts of time wondering where Jo was. Or, at least, I had been wondering. What had he been thinking? I feverishly went over conversations I had had with him. What had he said about her? He had fucked her in the same bed that he had fucked me. He hadn't thought to mention it. But, then, he hadn't mentioned to me that he had already fucked me. What other secrets did he have?
I tried to think of the innocent reasons he might have had for not telling me. He didn't want to upset me. It might have been awkward. But the other reasons kept intruding. I needed to think about this. I needed to sort it out in my head. But not here. I was starting to tell myself different stories in my head, and all of them definitely required that I get out of Ben's house as soon as possible. I looked at my watch. The day didn't seem so long any more. I ran into his bedroom and took my clothes off his clothes as if they were contaminated. I started to mutter to myself like a madwoman. I wasn't sure I could get it to make sense but the one thing that Jo and I had in common was that we had been sexually involved with Ben. There was no doubt about that. Not only-that, we had both been sexually involved with him just before we disappeared. I quickly pulled on my own clothes. I just couldn't get it to make sense. I had to think about it somewhere else, somewhere safe and quiet. Because I wasn't safe here any more. The quietness of the house closed round me.
Once I was dressed I moved quickly around the flat retrieving what I absolutely needed. Shoes, bag, sweater, purse, my horrible warm red jacket. What was he playing at with me? He'd lied to me, or sort of lied, or omitted to tell the full truth, and I wasn't going to sit here and wait for him to come home. I tried to remember that voice out of the dark. I'd heard Ben's voice in the dark as well, next to me in bed, murmuring in my ear, groaning, telling me he adored me. Could it be the same voice?