Famous Last Words

Chapter 46

46

Niall

‘Oh, it’s you,’ Viv says to Niall as she opens her door. As she says this, her face drops, and the evening sun scorches the back of Niall’s neck like a blush of shame. He’s calling in on his way to a little reconnaissance mission in Whitechapel, just to watch and wait. Swung by Viv’s on a whim.

Viv is in full off-duty mode. Bare feet, two toe rings on. The hammered silver catches and fragments the sun into thrown diamonds across the front path. He can’t stop looking at those bare feet. Pink polish. She’s wearing an oversized white something – he doesn’t know the term, but it’s the kind of thing you’d throw on over a swimming costume on holiday. It comes to her slender mid-thighs. She has what he knows will be a Chablis in her left hand. She stands on one foot, the other rubbing her ankle, as she looks up, perplexed, at him.

‘I’m on my way somewhere,’ he explains. ‘Thought I’d call in.’

Viv blinks, evidently surprised, which is not at all the emotion Niall intended to evoke. ‘Where?’ she says blankly.

‘Quarter of a mile away, on a job.’

‘Rather you than me,’ she says, still standing partially blocking the doorway. ‘When are you due there?’ she asks, as sharp a negotiator as anyone Niall has trained up.

He dodges the question. ‘I wondered if I might say something to you.’

She glances over her shoulder, just once, but Niall clocks it immediately. ‘Is somebody here?’ he says.

Viv raises her eyes heavenwards, saying nothing, but she turns away from him, heading inside, and he takes this as an invitation. He walks through her hallway, living room on the right, kitchen on the left, and out into the back garden. Nobody here except the old cat he saw the other day, and a second one with one eye.

‘New cats?’

‘New old cats. Owner died,’ she says.

It’s nothing like their place in central London. Viv moved here seven years ago, into rented, which is at least temporary, which keeps Niall’s hope alive.

‘Drink?’ she says sharply, gesturing with her Chablis. The bottle’s sitting on a wrought-iron table he doesn’t recognize.

‘This new?’ he says, tapping it. She sits down heavily in the chair.

‘Came with the house. Old tenants didn’t want it.’

He pauses in her garden, almost fully dark now, but still hot, humming with crickets that he’s sure weren’t in London a few years ago, and he tries to calm his mind, think about what Jess would say. He thinks she would say that it doesn’t matter whether or not he gets her back. Only that he says the right thing. His truth. The important thing. So that he is more able to live with himself. To move forward without her, to somebody new, whom he might treat better.

She pours him a glass and sits back. God, she still looks lovely. Just – lovely. Blonde hair, no greys yet, lines on her forehead, sure, but they look kindly.

‘Do you remember my siege case? In the London warehouse?’ he says, and then takes a sip of the wine. It explodes in his mouth – she always picked good wine. Cold, as clean and fresh as a bite of an apple that comes away in one neat slice. It slivers down his throat and zings through his bloodstream. Let her offer him another, let him be over the limit, let him have to stay …

‘Obviously,’ she says, the word loaded. Viv crosses her feet on the empty chair opposite her and next to Niall, and the case goes clean out of his mind: suddenly, all Niall can think about is those bare feet.

‘Well, I wanted to say I’m sorry. That case has reared its head again and – well. So have … other events of that night.’

‘Like?’ she says, voice as sharp as the wine.

‘Like me being a shit husband.’

She blinks, perhaps surprised. She looks at her feet for a few seconds, twitching her toes back and forth, evidently thinking. ‘I didn’t expect that,’ she says. ‘It was always that you’d done nothing wrong. That you had to work.’

‘I see now that I was single-minded. Am. And I know it wasn’t about the birthday.’

‘The bloody birthday was the final straw.’

She rises from her chair just slightly, tucks the foot with the toe rings on underneath her, and resettles herself like a contented cat.

‘It was seven years ago, Niall.’

‘I haven’t forgotten another birthday since.’

‘I know that,’ she says, but she says it gently.

‘I heard you broke up with the American.’

‘How do you know about that?’ she says, and Niall can tell, now, immediately, that he’s lost her. She’s become testy with him, prickly body language. God, who was he kidding? It isn’t about being able to live with himself , not at all. Of course it’s about being with her. And then she adds, ‘Don’t call him that.’

‘Rosalind told me,’ he says.

Viv sighs, looks into the distance, then sips her wine. ‘He wasn’t for me,’ she says flatly.

Because I am, Niall thinks, emboldened by the beautiful dark green summer evening, the wine, and her.

‘Niall,’ she says, her voice gentle, empathetic. Everything. He loves everything about her. That, later, she will drink two pots of tea right before bed and get up twice in the night to wee. Her mad rescue cats. How long she put up with him, despite everything. ‘You are obsessed with work,’ she finishes, verbalizing what has gone unsaid.

‘Yes.’

‘You obsess over things generally,’ she says. ‘You won’t change.’

‘I know, and I’m trying – Viv, I really am – to work out how I might do both.’

‘Do both?’

‘Be with you – and with my job.’

She pauses for a long while, then reveals her truth to him. ‘I was your first obsession,’ she says, and Niall can’t help but find that interesting, as well as upsetting.

‘I see.’

‘I was.’

‘Look.’ He takes a steadying breath. And here it is, his truth, communicated – he hopes – well. ‘I’m so sorry I didn’t put you first. It is the biggest regret of my life, in fact.’ He’s chosen his words carefully, and Viv’s green eyes are immediately wet, but she doesn’t open her mouth; she clamps it tightly shut like a baby about to sob.

And he’s so vulnerable here. He had no idea this is how people feel when they’re telling the full, whole truth. ‘I’m so sorry. It was not fair on you.’

‘Thank you for saying that,’ she says tightly, bottom lip wobbling. She casts her gaze downwards, long lashes fanning over her cheeks. The one-eyed cat ambles into the garden, bumps into the table.

‘I’m sorry I didn’t before. If we were – if we were ever together again – it would be …’

‘Don’t say that. But thank you.’

They lapse into a silence that might be companionable, and might be a hopeless kind of closure. Ten minutes later, she sees him out.

Ten minutes after that , a work text comes through.

Claire: Text Anon has confirmed the coordinates were sent by an account linked to Deschamps’s email. I’ll leave it with you.