When I arrived home I went straight upstairs and pulled off my clothes, just letting them fall, and got into a bath. I lay there for more than an hour, letting water out as it cooled and refilling it with hot, only my face protruding. If I had had the choice, I would have lain there for the rest of my life, warm and wet and safe. I scrubbed my face. I washed my hair and then I cut my toe- and fingernails as if I was purifying myself. Finally, reluctantly, I got out and put on what had become my normal domestic outfit of old jeans, baggy sweatshirt and slippers.
Then I started to clean the house. From cupboards and shelves I retrieved every bottle of bleach and disinfectant and polish in the house. With cloths and brushes and sprays, I scoured and scraped every surface. I filled two large bin-bags with rubbish and things that weren’t quite rubbish and things that weren’t really rubbish at all but that I thought I’d be better off without or that I could do without. I thought of one of my grandmothers – my father’s mother – who had seemingly spent her entire adult life cleaning. Even the thought of her conjured up a smell of pine-scented air-freshener. For her, cleanliness was a form of display, a recurrent demonstration that she had the cleanest lavatory of all of her friends. For me it was about purifying, cutting away, eliminating.
I checked the time. It was just after seven. When I had got rid of ten items of clothing, I could have a drink. It was easy. I instantly disposed of clothes I’d kept out of sentiment, because I’d worn them as a teenager or at college, or I’d been given them by a boyfriend or bought them in a particular place, that time in Queensland or Seville. As I crammed them into another bin-bag, I saw that I had put in far more than ten. Twenty at least. I deserved an extra large drink as a reward for that. And if I drank a whole bottle of wine, I could throw away the bottle.
There were eight in the little rack in the kitchen. I found the oldest wine I had. We’d bought it in France a couple of years earlier for what had seemed a lot of money at the time, ten or twenty euros. It had been for a special occasion that had never come. I opened it and poured myself a glass. I sipped. It tasted bitter. Was it corked? I’d never quite known what that meant. It would do, though. Perhaps it needed to be drunk with food. I didn’t have anything that seemed suitable so I toasted some bread and spread butter on it. I munched the toast and finished the glass of wine. Then I looked in the cupboard and found a tin of olives I’d forgotten. I opened the tin and cut my finger on the lid. I wrapped a tissue round it and poured myself another glass of wine. I ate an olive. Everything I ate, everything I drank, was emptying the house just a little more.
When the doorbell rang, I hadn’t quite finished the second glass of wine, but I still felt lightheaded. I opened the door. It was Johnny.
‘You’d better come in,’ I said wearily.
He walked inside, and although he’d been there before he was looking around him as if he was seeing it for the first time. I picked up my glass. ‘I’m drinking,’ I said. ‘You want some?’
‘All right.’
I poured him some wine and handed it to him. He took a gulp and pulled an approving face. He picked up the bottle and studied it. Then he raised his eyes and looked me squarely in the face. ‘Have you heard about Frances?’ he said.
‘What? Tell me.’
‘She’s dead. She was murdered.’ There was a pause. ‘You don’t look shocked.’
‘I knew.’
‘How?’
‘I found the body,’ I said. ‘I called the ambulance.’
Johnny was visibly startled. He stepped back as if I’d struck him. ‘You did? Then why weren’t you there when they arrived? Why didn’t you talk to the police?’
‘I came straight home.’
‘Why?’
‘I wasn’t ready to talk about it.’
‘I don’t think it works like that,’ he said. ‘When you find a body, you’re meant to stick around, you know, talk to the police, that sort of thing.’
‘There’s too much to explain.’
‘Is there now?’ He raised his eyebrows and a shiver of apprehension ran through me. ‘David rang me. One of the things he said was that the police want to talk to everybody involved. Apparently they’re having trouble tracking you down. For someone who’s been working in the office for several weeks, you haven’t left much trace.’
‘I wasn’t on the books,’ I said.
‘No address. No phone number.’
‘You’ve got my address,’ I said. ‘Why didn’t you tell them?’
I had a sudden sense of alarm. Had I miscalculated? Did anybody know that Johnny knew me? Did David?
‘Is there any reason why I shouldn’t?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’ve been thinking about it.’
Johnny frowned at me. ‘I don’t understand this and neither do I like it. Not one bit. You found the body. What’s the problem with talking to the police about it? Don’t you want to help them? And why are you so difficult to track down? Is there anything you want to tell me?’
It may have been the memory of Frances’s body in my arms or the wine or the sheer tiredness, but I couldn’t spin any more lies, not just then. But I took a deep breath before I spoke, because I felt I was stepping out into a different sort of world and I was scared. My skin was cold with fear.
‘I’m not Gwen,’ I said.
‘I don’t understand. What does that mean, you’re not Gwen?’
‘It means that my name isn’t Gwen. There is a Gwen Abbott. She’s a friend of mind. I borrowed her name. Stole it.’
‘I…’ He stopped, his mouth hanging open as he stared at me.
‘My real name is Eleanor. Eleanor Falkner.’
‘You mean you were lying?’ he said. ‘All the time?’
‘Yes.’
‘So when we were in bed together and I called you Gwen and you just… I don’t know what to say.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘It got out of hand.’
Johnny gave a horrible laugh. ‘Got out of hand?’
‘I didn’t mean it like that.’
He sat down heavily and some of his wine splashed on to the sofa. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed at it. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘You’ll want to put salt on that.’
‘It’s a crappy old sofa.’
‘So, Eleanor.’ Johnny said my name as if it was one he’d never heard before, from a different language, hard to pronounce. ‘Why did you do this? Or should I just call the police?’
I thought for a moment and then I went and sat beside him on the sofa. I told him he could call the police if he wanted, but first… And then I told him everything I could, not like a proper story but in a mess of fragments, all out of order, with additions and little explanations. I told him about Greg. I even fetched the picture of the two of us together. Johnny had seen me naked, slept with me, but now I felt even more naked, even more exposed to him. I told him about my connection to Milena. At first he asked questions, but as I continued he became quieter, his expression darker. When I finished he was silent for a long time.
‘I don’t even know where to start,’ he said. ‘How could you do such a thing? How could you lie to so many people?’
‘I didn’t plan it,’ I said. ‘Really I just wanted to see where Milena worked. I got invited in and it developed a momentum of its own.’
‘Just to take one example, almost entirely at random, you used me to get the password so that you could read Milena’s secret mail, things she wanted nobody to see.’
‘I didn’t plan things. I didn’t plan us. But she died with my husband. I needed to know everything I could.’
‘So I was just a step on that road,’ said Johnny. ‘Something a bit like Milena’s password.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t like that at all. I wasn’t using you. It was something that happened and I didn’t stop it happening – I still don’t know why.’