Chapter 9 #2
I couldn’t wait for them to leave and actually started hyperventilating as soon as they did.
It was like being trapped in hell, then suddenly set free.
Look, I’m not saying any of this means Lesley’s capable of…
Well, you know. I don’t actually think she could’ve done this.
Could she? I mean, I suppose she could have?
Someone did, didn’t they? One thing I do know: If I had to choose between Lesley and Alastair as the guilty party, I’d say her. Definitely.
***
Statement 2: This is Ed Debden, one of the church wardens and also a religious-icon painter and teacher of how to paint religious icons.
He’s the sweetest man, and everyone’s loved him ever since he painted an icon of the Farmer and gave it to him as a seventieth birthday present.
The Farmer asked if it wasn’t blasphemous, to which Ed replied, “You’d be surprised.
Our Lord is nowhere near as petty and unreasonable as so many people seem to think he is. ” I love him for saying that.
Yeah, I used to play squash with Alastair Gavey when he first moved to Swaffham Tilney.
I’ll admit: I liked him. He was good fun, always up for a chat and a few pints.
One thing I didn’t enjoy, though, was the way he talked to waiters and bar staff.
He couldn’t seem to help himself, and he did it every single time without fail.
I’d order my pint quickly and then close my eyes and pray that he’d just for once say something reasonable like, “A pint of Kingfisher, please,” but it never happened.
Every time, he would lob these cheesy questions at the waiter, different ones each time.
It was like he had an endless supply of the damn things.
So the waiter would say, “Right, sir, what can I get you?” and Alastair would put on this frankly embarrassing wise-looking expression, as if he was imitating an elderly owl in a tree, and say, “Tell me this: What do you think might be possible for you, in your life, that you haven’t contemplated yet?
” To which the confused and bewildered reply would always be something like “Er, dunno.” But Alastair would keep on: “How do you think you’d be able to tell if you were moving closer to your authentic self or further away from it? ”
He’d turn into this kind of, I don’t know, guru harasser every time someone handed him a menu, basically.
But since that was the only thing he ever did or said in my presence that was less than ideal, I carried on playing squash with him—and I think he was genuinely motivated by the idea that he could help these people, to be fair, so I’d just kind of look at my phone whenever it happened, or excuse myself to nip to the loo when I sensed he was about to pelt some poor lad or lass with more of his unsolicited personal-growth nuggets.
We remained friends until the day he confided in me that he’d made a pitch to a woman he worked with that the two of them should abandon their respective family and run off together.
She turned him down. He was honest enough to admit she’d been horrified by his suggestion, didn’t fancy him at all, and didn’t know where he’d got the idea from that something amazing was brewing between them.
I admired his honesty and decided that, though I disapproved, I also didn’t want to be the sort of friend who ditched a pal for making a mistake.
And then he said, “I don’t know what I saw in the stupid C-word anyway, to be honest. It must’ve been some kind of fever dream because when I looked at her in the cold light of day, I could see that she’s actually pig-ugly.
I’m not exaggerating: She looks like a pig, as in her face is the face of an especially snouty pig. ”
I wish I could tell you that the unpleasantness stopped there, but I’m afraid it didn’t.
He went on for the next half hour, saying things that were more obscenely misogynist than you can possibly imagine.
I’m not exaggerating. He said many things that I’m unwilling to repeat and wish I’d never heard.
I thought to myself later that day, not only did he say those things, but he also thought it was okay to say them to me.
It didn’t occur to him that I might not want to play squash with him anymore, having heard all that.
Which I definitely didn’t, though it took me a few more weeks to extricate myself from our arrangement. I had to invent a sprained ankle.
Does this mean I think Alastair did it? I don’t know.
Yes, I think he could’ve done, but that’s very different from saying that I think he did, if you see what I mean.
I sat opposite his wife once, at an ordeal of a quiz night at the Rebel of the Reeds, and I’d say that she also could have done it and seems as likely a candidate as him.
***
Statement 3: This one’s from Kellie Dholakhia, a primary-school teacher and the fiancée of Conrad Kennedy, who lives at the Byre.
Kellie’s fun, bubbly, and so sweet. I sometimes see her opening the Byre’s front door and bending over to shake some tissue paper near the doorstep before going back in—that’s her escorting individual insects out of the house and into the outdoors, when most people would probably squish them and flush them down the loo.
Yes, Lesley and I were good friends, I thought—until we weren’t.
It was the most bizarre thing. She broke off our friendship, not me.
She had a birthday party at the Stables soon after she and her family moved there and invited mainly people from her old life, saying she hadn’t yet made many friends in Swaffham Tilney.
I think she must have been paranoid that the party wasn’t going well—I mean, it was a bit quiet, and I felt sorry for her, so I thought I’d try to get a more fun, chatty vibe going by talking to another woman who was there…
and before I knew what had hit me, Lesley was swearing at us both, me and this woman, Abigail, and ordering us to “Fuck off out of my house.” I had no idea what I’d done wrong, and Abigail seemed equally clueless.
I left, obviously, but I went round the next day and asked Lesley what on earth I’d done to upset her so much.
She was all tight-lipped and avoiding eye contact, but she told me my mistake had been to approach Abigail—“my friend, not yours, Kellie!”—and start chatting with her.
Apparently, that was unforgivable and I was a friend poacher.
I was so shocked. All I’d done was talk to another guest at a party.
Isn’t that what party guests are meant to do?
Lesley eventually saw that I really hadn’t meant to upset her, so she invited me in and I thought she was going to apologize and say maybe she overreacted…
I mean, there was no maybe about it. She did overreact.
Conrad was incandescent with rage when he heard what had happened.
But I thought, if she apologized… But she didn’t.
She started to tell me, almost as if she was describing a special gift she had, that she feels envy very strongly.
Most people don’t suffer from it as badly as she does, she said, and it’s been something she’s had to try to cope with all her life.
She said, “Kellie, if I invite you to my party and I see you walking over and talking to someone you don’t even know, one of my friends, instead of coming and talking to me, when it’s my birthday, that’s always going to hurt me.
Always. I probably shouldn’t have let my feelings show in the way that I did, but if we’re going to be friends, I’m going to need you to be more sensitive in the future.
And actually, I’m never going to apologize for feeling how I feel, because emotions are never wrong.
Envy’s a natural response; we all feel it. I just feel it more deeply.”
The part that really threw me was the “instead of coming and talking to me” bit.
I made the mistake of reminding her that, before the party started, I’d spent two hours helping her prepare the food and set everything up and we’d been chatting nonstop that entire time.
“So?” she snapped in my face. “That wasn’t the party, was it?
That wasn’t you talking to me at my birthday party.
” Conrad was so upset at the thought of me carrying on my friendship with her that…
Well, that was it, pretty much. And she later told Michelle Hyde that I cut her out of my life because I’m shallow and can’t stand it when people honestly express emotions.
Having said all that, I’m positive Lesley didn’t do this.
Why? Because look what happened to her. She suffered as much as anyone else, and her whole ethos, I eventually realized, was “Everyone has to suffer apart from Lesley Gavey, who has to reign supreme.” No, she didn’t do it. No one will ever convince me she did.