Chapter 22
22
I’m not fully sure if Iain Hart wants or needs my calling around, but I absolutely can’t not do it, so I’m glad he seems to receive my visits with pleasure, albeit with a slight air of courteous bafflement. I make a peculiar busybody, but so far he’s not busy enough himself to mind.
Once a week I turn up on his doorstep, usually with biscuits—having usefully discovered Mr. Hart is a biscuit fiend—announce I was “in the area,” and ask if he “needs anything.” We have a cup of tea, a chat about this and that, and I reassure myself he seems safe and well enough to keep buggering on.
Today he seems edgier than usual, forgetting to eat his plain chocolate biscuits, wanting to tell me about the professional hierarchies at his long-since-sold company. I get the feeling he has a nagging sense of leaving things unattended, but isn’t able to articulate what or how. Up until now, his dementia has seemed quite benign, if sad. Because he’s outwardly so cheerful and functioning, it wasn’t too startling. Now I see more clearly that it’s a living prison.
“Anyway, I mustn’t run on and bore you,” he says. “You young people have got more exciting things to be doing. I was young once too, haha! Look, here...”
He picks up a picture on the mantelpiece, a 1980s wedding, full of leg-of-mutton sleeves, artificial flower crowns, and estate agent suits, and points to himself, more luxuriant in mustache. He has his hand on the head of a small, somber-faced, dark-haired boy, who must be Finlay.
“That’s my brother Don’s wedding. He lives in Edinburgh. A beautiful city, it’s where I grew up. Have you been?”
“Once as a kid, but not for ages,” I say.
“Oh you should, you should! I should visit Don actually; it’s been too long.”
“I’m sure he’d like to see you,” I say, wondering if Don was at the funeral. My only point of introduction would be Finlay, and he was hardly likely to bother. Had Susie told her uncle of her dad’s infirmity? She never spoke about her wider family, even when we were kids, really. If only we’d known we’d need handover notes. If only we’d known lots of things.
I get home with only half an hour to spare before Ed arrives, and find that I can’t eat for nerves. Wine for dinner it is then.
He arrives right on eight, and Roger’s at the door wailing his excitement as Ed steps into the room, the stripy traitor.
I hate that even now, at the sight of him in his raincoat and rain-damp hair, I want him to hug me. You cannot reason with what your senses crave, it seems. Everyone’s a fool for somebody , as my mum says.
“Alright, Rog, she not been feeding you again? Guess what Uncle Edward brought you!”
He produces Roger’s favorite beef-flavor chew sticks in front of him, and flaps the packet, at which point Roger’s vocal pitch moves from “girl at a Bay City Rollers concert” to “actual seizure.”
While he’s gnawing on Ed’s insufficient peace offering, our eyes meet fully. Ed is glowing with exercise.
“Drink?” I say, brusquely.
“One. I’m on my bike, don’t want to fall off.”
“Take a seat. Beer?”
“Yes, cheers.”
I go to the fridge, pour myself a large Sauvignon, then crack the ring pull on a can of Staropramen and hand it to him.
There’s no appetite for small talk and Ed, always one to read a room, says, businesslike: “Firstly, I’ve been wanting to say for ages, sorry for Hester being a dickhead at the wake. She’s pretty mortified at what was said. There’s no hard feelings. Or, not from her end.”
“I can’t believe she admitted she was out of order.”
I’m not going to be overtly rude about Hester to her fiancé, but equally, I’m not going to be so scrupulous about hiding my opinion of her behavior, from now on. Some truth has broken through. It can be the new normal.
“Yes, she has,” Ed says, with a forehead-creasing, hard frown that makes me think he came out of his corner fighting, once they were home.
“She was wasted”—she wasn’t, I think, but whatever works—“... and she’s got so consumed with the wedding. When I pointed out she was blithely talking about Susie being replaced, to her best friend, she got it.”
“Ah, OK.”
I think I see how the trick was worked. Ed, the man who could broker any peace. Don’t you see how devastated Eve will be not to have Susie by her side that day? Swinging the spotlight back to Hester, the sun that we planets revolve around.
What’s the betting his version also made Hester think I’d see the error of my ways and be shamefaced at insulting her, once sober? A truce where we both think the other surrendered.
Ed clears his throat. “As to the other...”
I sip my wine, look at him levelly. He sets his can down and pushes forward, hands on knees.
“I’m so sorry you found out about this when you did, Eve. Believe me. That day was hard enough without that on top. I can’t imagine how difficult it was.”
The empathy card. Or is he implying this is only sordid because Susie’s gone?
“When you keep secrets, you never know when they’re going to come out, I guess,” I say.
My voice sounds tight.
“I’d almost forgotten it’d happened, you know. We’d dug deep to bury it.”
“Sounds like you’re pretty rubbish in bed, then,” I say. “Most of us would have a memory of banging one of our best mates.”
Ed flinches.
Yes, bad luck. I’m not going to play along with any I tripped up, fell on her, I’m so haplessly clumsy that penetration occurred, memory very fuzzy minimization game.
“It was ten years ago, that much you know, I think.”
I’ve never seen Ed look this discomfited.
“... It was a Friday night. We decided at the last minute we were both bored and wanted to go out. Hester was in Switzerland doing the au pairing.”
I’d forgotten that. Hester was working full time but took a summer sabbatical to teach English to a brood of rich kids. She’s one of those people who needs to staple extra pages to her CV as opposed to bumping the font size up, like me. Mark once said mine had EVELYN HARRIS so big it could be a flypast banner.
“Justin was in London that weekend on one of his bacchanals.”
I’m waiting for Ed to know where I was. You... we didn’t call you.
“You were off somewhere in the early days of Mark.”
Ah. This throws me, for a moment. I should’ve spotted it was that era.
“We went to the Tap and Tumbler, played pool, drank loads on an empty stomach, got accidentally wrecked, had half a pill each. Then we went to the club at Rock City...”
I wait. I can feel the rising heat of my sweat under my clothes.
“Remember they always played Rage Against the Machine? ‘Killing in the Name’ came on, and somehow”—he blows air out—“one thing led to another...”
“Oh don’t ‘one thing led to another’ me, Ed,” I snap, in my embarrassment as much as his. “You’re not telling the kids in class that your wife’s having a baby.”
Ed flushes.
I’m a paper tiger. I’m interrogating a man who is engaged to be married to someone else, not me, about sex that happened a decade ago, with another someone else who is no longer here. My rights here are far from clear. It wasn’t me who Ed cheated on, yet I feel jealous, betrayed, and gut-twistingly angry. I’m presenting as indignant and righteous but, in actual fact, I’m drowning in shame and confusion of my own.
This is why you don’t stay in dysfunctional unspoken love with spoken-for people. A few chess moves later, it looks completely mad. I guess it always was completely mad.
“You know, drunk air-punching during the chorus, turned into hugging, then woah, somehow, without knowing who started it, we’re kissing,” Ed says. “It was one of those spur-of-the-moment total pieces of insanity that seems to make sense to you when you’ve had five pints of lager on an empty stomach and you’re twenty-four-years old.”
“So you kissed, and...?” I say.
“We went back to Suze’s to get drunker. Remember when she had the flat for debauchery in Lace Market? It was a getting-smashed escalation where doing the next thing, and the next, seemed a good idea, we were almost daring each other. We were off our faces. Neither of us left the house that night intending it.”
I prepared for tonight, as much as I could, and I force myself to ask (or I’ll be condemned to forever wonder): “Susie’s description of it was ‘torrid’?” Well, Becky’s. Same-same.
Ed’s face has gone from shrimp pink to shrimp pink tinged with sickly white. I really hope he’s not about to admit to an act I’ll have seared on my imagination’s retina forever.
“We did it in the loos at the club,” he says, after a pause, and I swallow.
The severe crush I have suffered for ten years is dealt a body blow. A two-body blow.
I will always have to have this as part of my mental landscape of Susie and Ed: a frantic coupling in a graffiti-strewn toilet stall, Arctic Monkeys pounding through the walls. As a definition of torrid, I suppose it’s preferable to some degenerate activity I’d never heard of involving orifices and water-balloon animals, as if the world is some huge gangbang I’ve not been invited to. If I’m placing it on the great sliding scale of “the best to worst sort of unusual sexual activity for two friends to partake in, when breaking a third party’s heart.” A third party. That’s me.
“Susie led me into the ladies. We did it again at hers. We passed out. We woke up in the morning to the worst hangovers of our lives, absolutely crucified with horror by it. Believe me, a huge motivation for hiding it was how badly we both wished it had never happened. We agreed not to tell you and Justin...”
“Justin doesn’t know either?”
That’s something. I’m not alone.
“Yeah, he does. I told him, down the line. Susie didn’t know that.”
“ What?! ”
“Man-to-man, late-night-confessional kind of thing. To get it off my chest when I felt guilt over Hester.”
“Great, so I was the only one. Susie never told me.”
The sense of having been made a fool of, sitting there as the sole member who didn’t know this thing, who wasn’t mature enough somehow to be told this thing, gives me a feeling of intense rejection. It’s like what Ed did when we were eighteen, squared.
“She bottled it. As time passes it gets harder and harder to come clean. Bottlings only get bigger. It’s the cost of cowardice. The price of making the wrong choice at the outset.”
Ed stares at me heavily, as if there might be a double meaning, and I’m grateful for Roger’s sudden screech for a second chew stick, breaking the tension. Ever resourceful and charming, Ed has another one, of course.
Amid the noise of eager feline mastication, Ed continues: “After Susie had finished throwing up that morning, we discussed what we stood to damage or lose entirely by being a pair of twats. I’d been unfaithful to Hester. We’d potentially upset this—” Ed says, gesturing at me, but meaning our group. “For what? For something animal we’d done after drowning our frontal lobes in Heineken. We could barely look each other in the eye. We didn’t remotely fancy each other and, in the cold light of day, that made it simpler, but also much worse. I’ve never known self-loathing like it.”
I strain to remember any time when I’d come back from seeing Mark, when Susie had been different. I can’t. I remember larking around in that flat, Susie smoking with her arm held out of the sash window. She was seeing people, on and off, but never anyone significant.
With some effort, I remember her once saying to me, uncharacteristically pensive: “The thing about you and men, Eve, is you fall very rarely and very hard. I fall often, but I’m over it in a week.”
She must’ve meant Ed—so she fell for him too? Why did she never confess? Did she think I’d explode into a shower of dry leaves? I pick up my glass.
“You let Hester carry on being friends with Susie, with no idea?”
“That was utterly shit of me, yes. But I only had shit choices. If I confessed and our relationship survived it, I wouldn’t have been allowed to still be mates with Suze, so RIP our gang. She’s always been messed-up about how close we all are, as you may have noticed. The cost-benefit didn’t seem worth it, and it still doesn’t.”
“The cost-benefit,” I say, witheringly. “It wasn’t about balancing books. It wasn’t going to benefit you.”
“No, exactly, who would it benefit? Hester deserves to know the truth, in principle, but it wouldn’t benefit her, quite the opposite. There’s no way of discussing this without sounding terrible, because it was. It was a really gross thing to do and I’m ashamed of it to this day. I offered the ugly truth and, yes, it’s ugly.”
I’m randomly reminded of my mum and dad arguing over Bill Clinton’s impeachment. My dad saying: “You ask a man if he fooled around with someone who wasn’t his wife, he’s going to say no, isn’t he? What man in the world when put on the spot would say, ‘Ya got me’? I don’t see why him lying was a big deal when anyone in his shoes would.” My mum replying: “He shouldn’t have fooled around!” My dad: “Yes, but that’s a ‘I wouldn’t start from here’ when someone’s asking for directions, Connie, isn’t it?”
Am I unreasonable, asking Ed to be better than a president? Ed’s lies have only been omission.
Roger, offstage, slaps at the door on his cat litter box.
“... I’ve asked myself, apart from alcohol, why I did it,” Ed says. “I’ve never come up with a better answer than ‘because I could.’ You can’t disown your own character under the influence. Suze used to taunt me for being staid, a lot. I think showing off might’ve been involved. When I realized what she was intending, me feeling I had to meet the challenge and show I could be wild too. Ironic, given there was nothing to be proud about in what happened, the opposite. I couldn’t have made myself look or feel more ridiculous.”
“Oh, it was her pushing for it, was it?” I say, rolling my eyes.
“As I recall, yes,” Ed says, looking dog-tired all of a sudden. “I can’t be sure, given how drunk we were. But I wouldn’t have dared drag her to the women’s bathroom.”
There is, at the heart of this explanation and apology—if that’s what it is—a problem. All this might be true, but the connection I thought Ed and I had—it can’t exist. Or not in the way I thought it did, if he could do this. Anyone but her, the closest human being to me. I weathered the treachery of Hester, as I could follow how it happened. Not this.
“This isn’t the person I thought you were,” I say, bleakly. And although, in my head, this wasn’t a killer line, only a spasm of pain that I couldn’t help exiting my mouth, Ed visibly crumples at it.
“Yes, I know,” he says. He takes a deep breath. “It’s not who I thought I was. Your opinion is everything to me.”
The most difficult part of this for me is upon us, and I have to tackle it, even though it makes me feel like I’m sitting here naked.
“Susie said in her letter she didn’t want me to know, in particular?” I hold my breath.
Ed breaks eye contact for a moment and says: “She was aware there was... something between us. She felt she’d let you down, because of that.”
I writhe, and maintain a false composure. “Did you tell Susie about the letter you sent me? At university?”
“No! Why would I do that?” Ed, wide-eyed, thinks he’s scored a point here, kept my confidence. But I know what it means—he let it all rest on me.
“Then why would she think there was something between us?”
This is a question I would only dare ask under extreme du ress, and to someone with Ed’s size of motive to be tactful right now. Did I really make it obvious? is one of the world’s most agonizing inquiries.
Ed lifts his hands from his knees in an I don’t know gesture. “I’m not sure.”
“What did she say?” I ask.
“Do you really want me to go into this?” he says.
“No, Ed, I don’t!” I say, temper breaking, in my fierce blushing. It’s a funny combination. “I don’t want to hear a word of it, but thanks to you, it happened, I found out, and Susie’s dead. I’m going to have to spend the rest of my life wondering why she kept this from me, otherwise. It’s ‘need,’ not ‘want.’ I’d have thought that was pretty obvious.”
“She said she thought you were in love with me and it would destroy you,” Ed says, in a rush, and looks at his knees.
I’m damp with sweat. I don’t change expression.
“Erm, OK. Wow.” This is good and ambiguous, I think. It could mean Wow she knew? or Wow she thought that? “Then you said...?”
“I agreed it wasn’t a good idea to tell you.”
“But you didn’t say oh hey, I told Eve I was madly in love with her , a few years back?”
“No,” Ed says, frowning. “It wasn’t the moment and I kind of assumed you’d have told Susie about that at the time, anyway?”
It hadn’t occurred to me he’d think this. I suppose he would’ve thought that, what with girl talk and gossip. The truth is, it was first too precious, and then too painful, to let any sunlight in on it. And as usual, the group was to be protected at all costs.
I only say: “Nope.”
I wonder why he thinks I didn’t tell Susie.
“Eve,” Ed says. “I know ‘speaking for Susie’ keeps tripping us up, but she’d be crushed to think she’d hurt you by keeping this from you. Nothing mattered to her the way you did. Nothing .”
This rings hollow, after talking about a night when my feelings definitely didn’t matter to her. She knew I was in love, and it would destroy me, and she still did it. “Destroy”—her word, not mine.
For nothing more than an ungainly, sloppy one-night stand. She was Susie Hart—she could’ve gone home with any man in that club if she’d wanted to.
What would she say if she were here? I can only imagine some version of Ed’s “We were drunk, we were idiots.” Much stupid, so regret. What other excuse is there? She wasn’t the person I thought she was.
“Would Hester still marry you if she knew?” I say, making it clear there’s no point to any more mollifying speechifying from Ed.
“I don’t know. It would be an apocalyptic fight. It being Susie would make it a thousand times worse, of course, compared to some anonymous woman. I don’t want her to think less of Susie.” Ed holds up a palm as he sees my jaw drop. “Yeah, you can call that a really slimy thing to say, it is, but it’s true. You think Susie would want that, in her memory? Us splitting up over some decade-old embarrassing transgression? Or Hester being tormented by the thought of it? You’ve found it gruesome enough.”
“Well, I’m implicated now,” I say, interrupting, before we get into measuring of what I’m feeling versus what Hester would. “Because in your vows there’ll be that bit about if anyone knows any reason why these two should not be joined ...”
“You’d not be the first person to sit through that part of a ceremony and know something about the bride or groom that either one of them doesn’t.”
Ed tries for a small rueful smile, and I stare it down.
“It’s not funny.”
“It’s not. I’m not saying you can’t tell Hester if that’s what your conscience tells you to do. I’ve never cheated on Hester, apart from that one time.”
“Oh, paging Pride of Britain awards.”
“No! I mean, it’s not habitual, this isn’t the tip of an iceberg. You’re not letting another woman walk unwitting into a marriage with King Rat.”
“Hmmm.”
I’m not going to tell Hester. Given how little I think of her, it would be nothing but revenge on Ed, and, as my mum says, revenge is throwing piss in a strong wind. She should know.
“Thanks for hearing me out. I know none of this is easy.”
I agree it isn’t, and feel the emptiness I knew was on the other side of this groveling. Now what? Accept it and carry on.
Ed leans down to pet Roger, who’s winding himself around his ankles and clearly pondering a bid for Chew Stick 3: The Enfattening.
“You’ve been off the radar a bit since the funeral... are you OK? Apart from the giant things that aren’t OK?”
I raise my shoulders and drop them. “Yes and no.”
Ed nods. He’s temporarily lost his rights to be emollient Ed, and he knows it. He scrunches the sides of his empty can, making a small crackling noise.
As he leaves, he says: “You’ll come to Justin’s birthday, though, right?”
“Oh? Yes. Has he planned anything?”
“Not that I know of. It’ll be low-key, obviously. As much as anything involving Justin is low-key.”
Ed smiles, clearly in relief at the status quo returning. The explosive device, defused. I don’t smile back. He knows I’m not going to tell Hester, so we’re back to how it was, except we aren’t and never will be.
“Can you do me a favor? Don’t tell Justin we had this conversation? I’m hoping you haven’t filled him in on any of this,” I say.
“None of it,” Ed says.
He looks at me and realizes he can’t risk so much as a pally shoulder squeeze.
“Bye,” I say.
After I close the door, I feel flattening disappointment with myself, as well as him, and I know why.
I didn’t have the guts to ask: did you think I was in love with you?