“And? Who gives a fuck? This doesn’t have to be some huge all-or-nothing event.” He’s annoyed, and for a second she thinks that he’s getting up to leave but instead he comes around and plops himself down onto the bench beside her. “What do you want me to say here? I would like to have sex with you again, but I’d also be happy sitting here with you and talking all night.”
“Right, well, I’m not exactly sure how to take that.”
He leans in and kisses her and then dunks his thumb into his pint and runs it lightly under her right eye and then under her left.
“What are you doing?!”
“War paint.”
Jane laughs. “This is a war?”
“No. This is something else.”
By ten o’clock the waitress working the other end of the pub, and every other girl within five years of Blake’s age, has walked past the table to have a look at Jane. It becomes a running joke; every time someone walks to the back of the pub where their booth is, Blake automatically says, “Sorry about that.” It occurs to Jane more than once that she should tell him her real name, admit something more truthful about herself, but the banter is easy—“If you could only listen to one piece of music for the rest of your life …” and “Where would you like to travel to?”—and more honest than “So, how long will you be in Inglewood?”
A tinny version of “Anarchy in the U.K.” blares in Blake’s coat pocket. He roots around for his mobile, says hullo and then excuses himself to speak to the caller. Jane watches him exit the pub; she assumes he’s talking to his maybe-current girlfriend or a mate he’s told about the thirty-four-year-old from London he’s banging. While she waits for him to come back she slides her hand over the wood grain of the table, swirls her finger over the pool of condensation left by his last pint.
When she was fifteen, she, William and Lily had sat in the booth opposite the one where she is now. At the end of the lunch William had gone to pay but realized he’d forgotten his wallet in the glovebox. He explained the situation to the barman, asked if he could run up the road to get it, said that the girls would stay. The barman called them “collateral” and laughed. Jane had forgotten that.
If that Jane was still here, if she still existed in some way — a self-conscious fifteen-year-old in hoop earrings and a new blue dress who wants, more than anything, to be seen — what would she make of Jane now? Would she be happy that grown-up Jane is looking over at her, at her nervousness and exaggerated pronouncements, at the spot of gravy Lily had splashed onto Jane’s lap, at the shoes that gave her a blister within an hour of putting them on?
We watch Jane watching herself, watching the girl she was before we met her. Her finger circling the mark made by Blake’s pint in this world, Lily spinning a key on a ribbon in the other.
Sitting in the pub and waiting for Blake to return it occurs to Jane that accountability is a complicated thing: trying to ferret out what you owe yourself and what you owe others.
Lewis made an offhand comment about this once to Jane at a Friday-night dinner at his house. He had tested the chicken curry he’d made to see if it was too spicy for the girls and was dumping in a can of coconut milk to compensate for the heat. He turned to Jane. “You’re lucky, you know, that you don’t have anyone to be responsible for.” He saw the expression on her face and apologized, said that he was talking about the curry, that he liked it hot but the girls couldn’t handle the chilies — adding that they hadn’t had spicy curry in five years.
Both Lewis and Claire felt the burden of accountability in spades. Jane suspects Claire liked it that way. She and Lewis were the types who’d get everyone out of a burning building before the rafters fell, who’d go back for the stragglers. Even Claire’s suicide was a way of refusing to push the inconvenience of her cancer onto anyone else. The fact that hanging herself was the wrong decision for Jane and Lewis doesn’t negate the set of considerations that went into the decision. Jane knows that she is more like Henri. She and her father interpret: choose to be accountable when it works for them, when the wind is blowing a certain way or holidays line up or some poor girl from a Victorian asylum goes missing and makes a hole in a page just big enough for all of Lily to fit into.
Sitting in the pub, Jane tries to line up her story the way we try to line up ours. There was a girl called N. There was a girl called Lily. One day Jane stood in a beautiful tract of woods and a five-year-old ran along a trail ahead of her and Jane became transfixed with the way the sun flickered over the leaves at her feet, a box of light framed by the trees. And so she stopped and played at stepping into it. Because of that moment, she has put a bar of light into every story she has ever read or told. That is not accountability. It’s a way of trying to place one’s self in the world; it’s conjecture. Which is a way of saying, It’s a lie.
Blake comes back to the booth and apologizes. He admits sheepishly that he was supposed to babysit his younger sister, but he’s bailed, and he has been trying to reach his brother to fill in. He looks embarrassed, and when he sits beside Jane again he slides his hand under the table, pushes the hem of her skirt above her knee, reasserts himself.
“My name isn’t Helen.”
Blake shakes his head as if he has water in his ears. “That’s”—and he searches for the right word—“unexpected.” After a minute he says, “Are you a murderer?”
Jane laughs, but it’s not a normal laugh, it’s the kind that could snag and become something else. No one has asked her that before and the question is both horrible and a release.
Blake starts to say her name and the H comes out before he stops, says, “I don’t exactly know what to do here.”
Jane can sense him backing away, can feel the space he’s made on the bench between them.
“It’s Jane.”
“Jane?”
“Yes, I promise.”
“And you’re married? And some posh bastard is on his way up here right now to have a go at me?”
“I’m not married.”
Blake rubs his neck. Before he can say anything, the ping of a text goes off on his mobile, and maybe buying time to think, he checks it and then puts it back in his pocket.
It occurs to Jane that even though she’s glad she has told Blake about her name, it’s probably too much for him. She’s twisted their narrative around and made it too strange, and to her surprise she feels immensely sad about that, not because she wanted to keep him but because he seems like a good person and because whatever it was that passed between them, it at least felt real.
“Why did you lie?”
“I didn’t mean to, it’s—” She tries to catch his eye, but he won’t look at her. “It’s complicated.”
Blake pushes his palms against the edge of the table so hard his knuckles go white, and in the silence that follows, Jane imagines that he’s trying to decide whether to get up and walk out of the pub or stay and sort it out.
The mobile pings again and Blake checks it and then he stands up. “Listen, my parents were supposed to be at their friends’ place an hour ago. My mom’s really pissed off.” He puts his mobile away and for a second Jane is unsure what, exactly, he intends to do. She’s about to say Right, go on then when he reaches his hand out and says, “You still owe me an explanation.”
Blake’s sister Gemma is a pudgy twelve-year-old who squints up from under her fringe at Jane before promptly turning back to the telly. Blake’s parents hover in their cluttered sitting room after Blake introduces Jane, and Martin narrows his eyes as if he’d somehow misremembered her name.