Four months before Lucian
The place is crawling with police, a brutish juxtaposition against the pastel-coloured idealism of last night.
The sky-blue jetty is an insult.
The pink and green boats turn my stomach.
The lanterns that flip and turn over in the morning wind seem to jeer and screech and those yellow shoes, marooned on the bank, are a vicious, acid-bright reminder that Ling is dead.
I am down by the lake with Andrew, drinking coffee from a Thermos that Mary has brought for us, waiting for the divers to arrive.
As I shake out yet another cigarette from the packet, Andrew says, ‘Think I could have one?’
‘I didn’t know you smoked.
’
‘Not for years.’
We smoke in silence and stand together, looking out at the lake.
‘Harry asked to be woken when the divers get here. Don’t know if it will be possible.
’
Harry was knocked out, literally, by some rock-and-roll doctor Andrew called in, who sedated him like a horse.
It took four men to carry him up to bed, with Alexa stationed beside him on an all-night vigil just in case he wakes.
‘And anyway isn’t it better for him not to see?
She’s been underwater for five or six hours.
’
‘I don’t think we can make that decision, Lucian.
’
For Harry, of all people, to have lost his wife on my watch, on my land and after all those years of aloneness is too much.
I don’t know that I will ever be able to forgive myself.
‘Why don’t you go and see if he’s awake?
’ Andrew says. ‘I can deal with the divers.’
He wants to spare me everything if he can.
I watch as he joins a cluster of policemen on the jetty, a pale-faced, broken man, sick from his cigarette, in a crumpled, up-all-night suit.
It’s true I don’t want to see Ling dragged from the water in her effervescent yellow.
And I don’t want Harry to see her either.
The question mark over her death, the agonising, unexplained vanishing, is impossible to comprehend.
But one thing I know is that the sight of her dead body will destroy him.
In the blue bedroom, the one where Alexa normally sleeps, Harry is passed out, still wrapped in blankets (we had to cut his wet clothes from him in the end), Alexa curled up beside him in her silver dress, one slim brown arm draped across the mountain of his chest. I wonder if this was how he and Ling used to sleep.
It occurs to me that I never once saw them in bed together, never sat on the edge of their bed drinking coffee and discussing the night before the way you do with your oldest friends.
It would have happened, sooner or later, but there just wasn’t time.
Alexa opens her eyes, registers me and her face collapses.
Instantly she’s crying, silently, though, just long black rivulets of tears, last night’s mascara working its way slowly down her face.
I sit down beside her on the edge of the bed and she levers up and wraps her arms around my neck, face pressed into my heart.
‘I can’t bear it for him,’ she whispers, and I feel the vibration of her words against my sweater.
‘Nor can I.’
My phone dings with an arriving text and we both shoot our heads round to check on Harry, but he’s out for the count.
I take my phone out of my pocket.
It’s from Andrew.
‘Shit,’ I say.
‘The divers are down at the lake. We should wake him.’
Alexa pushes herself back against the mahogany headboard and sits there, arms braced around her knees, looking sideways at him.
‘I don’t think we should.
’
‘It’s not our choice, Lex,’ I say, echoing Andrew.
I watch her rest a slim brown hand against his cheek, fingers with giant silver rings, and I am reminded of Ling and her comedy diamond.
‘What if he thinks you’re her?
’ I whisper, and Alexa snatches her hand away.
‘Oh God.’
She wipes her hands across her face, smudging her clown’s tears into dirty streaks.
‘I never thought he’d marry,’ she says.
‘I just thought he was one of those funny old bachelor types who would spend his days drinking port and shuffling around his great big house with his Labradors for company. And until I met Ling I assumed that somehow that was enough and Harry was happy with it. But he wasn’t happy, was he?
And then he did find a girlfriend, actually a wife, and look what happens …
’
She breaks off, crying quite loudly now.
It can only be a matter of time before Harry wakes.
Maybe that’s a good thing, I don’t know.
‘I’ve spent most of the night lying here thinking about Harry and Ling.
I remember after lunch at Harry’s place the other day I thought how lucky they were, the way they’d found each other in pretty unlikely circumstances, let’s face it.
But I’ve also been thinking about Jack.
And me. And Celia. You know about me and Jack, don’t you?
You know we’ve carried on our thing right the way through his marriage?
’
‘God, Lex, I didn’t know.
I always thought you were still a bit in love with him but that’s all.
’
‘Yes, I’m in love with him.
But that doesn’t excuse what I’ve done.
Do you remember that night when they had just got back from their honeymoon and Celia went home early?
He came back with me.
I tried to stop him, I tried not to have sex with him, but I just couldn’t seem to help it.
I’m powerless where Jack’s concerned.
I always have been.’
I shake my head, for I am wordless.
The depth of his treachery.
Was Catherine powerless too?
You stole my girlfriend.
You betrayed your wife.
And me, how you have betrayed me .
‘I don’t know why I can’t give him up.
I’ve tried to so many times.
I hate myself for what I’m doing to Celia.
Sleeping with her husband behind her back.
I feel like such a bitch.
Every time I do it, I hate myself a bit more.
’
‘I don’t know what to say, Lex.
Jack is trouble. And you and I both know that.
Remember what he said to you about Catherine?
She’s not who everyone thinks she is?
Well, neither is he.
’
Alexa stares back at me with confused, troubled eyes and I want so much to tell her the truth – the filthy, ugly truth.
Catherine and Jack slept together.
That man you love, the one we have both loved for so long, is bad right the way through.
And yet I also want to keep this lethal little bullet of knowledge for myself.
‘Why are we even talking about Jack anyway? We should be focusing on Harry.’
Maybe through the waves of temazepam or ketamine or whatever it was the doctor gave him, Harry hears his name, because he shifts in his sleep and the sheets make a soft sighing sound beneath him.
I think he is starting to wake up.
I need to find some strength to deal with his spilt-second reality; any minute now he’ll be opening his eyes to instant horror, just as Alexa did, only a thousand times worse.
A new text arrives, making us jump.
My heart squeezes painfully; I almost can’t look.
‘Is it from Andrew?’
I nod, reading the screen.
They’ve got her is all it says.
An hour later and I have dropped Harry home and am on my way to Jack’s house.
How many times have I made this journey, but never like this: my heart feels hollow, my brain half dead.
And beneath it all, I pulse with fury.
It has been the worst of nights.
Harry, as expected, insisted on seeing Ling before her body was taken away.
Alexa and I escorted him to the lake, holding onto one arm each, Harry stumbling as though he was lame and dressed, incongruously, in a pair of my tracksuit bottoms, the only thing that came close to fitting him.
Ling was laid out on a stretcher covered in a black plastic sheet with a crowd of men standing by: the policemen who had been here all night and someone who turned out to be the pathologist.
Harry half collapsed when he saw the stretcher, head and shoulders right down, a dead weight, but Alexa and I just clutched him even tighter and somehow we made it.
Andrew walked the last few paces to meet us.
‘Harry,’ he said. ‘I am so sorry.’
Harry said, ‘Please,’ though it was more of a croak than a word.
The policemen scattered and the pathologist introduced himself.
He told us Ling’s body had been found lodged in a thick tangle of weeds at the bottom of the lake.
‘Are you saying she was stuck there?’ Harry asked.
‘Is that why she drowned?’
‘It’s impossible for us to know exactly what happened.
She’d been drinking, so she probably didn’t realise how cold she was until it was too late.
Your muscles are the first part of your body to lose heat, which means your legs and arms sometimes stop working.
You’re trying to swim but you find you can’t.
Suddenly you don’t have the power to swim even a short distance.
’
‘Why didn’t she shout out to us?
She can’t have been far away.
’
‘Often people make no sound at all as they drown. They’re trying to save all their oxygen to keep breathing.
’
‘How long? How long would it have taken?’ Harry said, and the pathologist looked away for a second.
‘Almost instant,’ he said.
Harry wanted to be left alone with Ling, and though Alexa and I tried to stay with him, he shouted at us to get away, dropping to his knees by the stretcher.
We turned our backs on him, though it made little difference.
Even now his shock and heartache at the sight of his dead wife is imprinted on my mind, devastating and ineradicable.
I’m worried for Harry, worried where this is going to end.
Desperation is something I know.
What is there for Harry without Ling?
Or for me without Catherine?
Now with her name comes the image of Jack.
Jack and Catherine. Oh, I can see it, in perfect, graphic clarity.
Her young, pale naked body sitting astride him, his hands reaching up for her nipples, her dark eyes flashing ecstasy, the piercing lechery of his blue ones.
They could not have picked a better way to destroy me.
I’m not surprised they decided not to tell me.
I wouldn’t have forgiven them, then or now.
Jack and Celia’s house, just a mile down the road from my own, is like a second home.
Or rather, it used to be.
They did that clever thing of buying a beautiful old farmhouse, pale grey stone, leaded windows, thatched roof, and ripping it to shreds inside.
So now they have a house that to all intents they have built themselves, only it doesn’t look that way.
On any other day I would have loved arriving to their immaculate lime-green lawn, the air sweet with the full-blown scent of late-summer roses, a handful of birds surfing the thermals in small, lazy circles.
But now I have only two thoughts.
Harry has lost his wife.
And Jack betrayed me.
Celia hurries across the lawn to meet me, Freddie in her arms.
‘God, you haven’t been to bed yet, have you?
I’m sorry we left when we did, just Freddie—’
I bat away her apology.
As if that could matter.
‘Do you know what happened?’
‘She got into difficulty somehow, might have been cramp or maybe her muscles seizing up because she was cold. That happens a lot, apparently, especially when you’re drunk.
We were probably swimming for a while, longer than we realised.
And then once she hit the bottom she might have got trapped in the weeds and couldn’t get back up again.
We’ll never know.’
‘That’s horrific.
’
‘I knew about the weeds. I should have known something like this could happen. If I hadn’t been drunk, I would have stopped her.
’
‘Lucian, this is not your fault.’
I shrug, knowing there is no point having this conversation.
‘How’s my godson?’ I say, an effort at normalcy as we walk towards the house.
When Jack and Celia asked me to be godfather, I almost said no.
‘You are joking?’ I think was my first response, but it turned out they weren’t.
‘He took another step this morning,’ Celia says.
‘If you can call it that.’
She is unapologetically Sloaney today: blonde hair held back by a silk scarf, pale pink shirt, navy three-quarter-length trousers; all that’s missing is the pearls.
But my heart aches a little to see her.
Celia, with her unappreciated domestic skills and her firm but fair efficiency, is exactly what I need right now.
In the kitchen, a huge barn-like room with floor-to-ceiling windows across one side, Jack lies on a giant overstuffed sofa, hand clutched round the neck of a beer bottle, TV remote balanced on his stomach.
He’s watching the Grand Prix, and the furious buzzing – like bees on amphetamines, I always think – slices through my brain.
‘Jesus, man, what’s happening?
Are you alright?’ he says when he sees me, though he doesn’t bother to get off the sofa.
I tell him what I know.
That Harry has gone home, refusing to have Alexa or Rachel or me staying with him, for tonight at least. That we’ve got Andrew’s doctor on standby with a sackload of meds and the plan is to sedate him through the next twenty-four hours.
That Ling got into problems in the lake probably because she was cold.
‘She might have had an undiagnosed heart problem. I guess we’ll find out.
’
‘Right.’ Jack shrugs and clicks his eyes back to the screen, draining the contents of his bottle and setting it down on the floor.
‘Turn the fucking television off.’
Jack looks up in surprise, but he picks up the remote and silences the screen.
‘Harry’s wife just died.
Do you even care?’
‘I know you haven’t had any sleep, but don’t take it out on me.
’
You fucked my girlfriend – your kind of word, your kind of action.
I’m not sure whether to cry or slap him.
I’m not sure how to cure my heart, broken by Ling’s death, scalded by the betrayal of my supposed best friend.
Now is not the time.
I repeat it in my brain like a mantra.
Clearly now is not the time.
‘Be nice, Jack,’ Celia calls from the other end of the kitchen.
‘Shut up,’ Jack says, without bothering to look up at her.
Like I say, I’m re-evaluating everything.
Not just the fact that he slept with Catherine – and oh God, the pain that image brings.
But the way he treats his wife.
These sudden glimpses of brutality.
And I am wondering, right now, why it is that my friendship with him has been so enduring.
Was he laughing at me all along, while he shared my house and drank my wine and ate at all the most expensive restaurants on my credit card and then stole the one person, the only person who has ever really mattered to me?
‘Would you like some eggs, Lucian? Or something else?’ Celia asks.
Anything I eat will taste like cardboard.
Cardboard eggs. May as well.
‘What I’d really like is a beer,’ I say, and Jack gets to his feet for the first time.
I cannot look at him.
I can barely stop myself reaching out and grabbing him by the throat.
Is it true? Did you fuck her?
Did you really do that to me?
While Jack gets my beer, I crouch down to talk to Freddie, who is strapped into one of those low-slung bouncy chairs.
‘Keys?’ I say, pulling my keys out of my jeans pocket, and he snatches them from my hand and holds them up close to his face, deadly serious, frowning, as if he’s examining a diamond for flaws.
I can see from Celia’s expression, rounded eyes, mouth pursed, that car keys were not the right thing to give him.
‘Here.’ Jack hands me a Beck’s.
‘Great party, by the way,’ he says, chipping the top off another bottle for himself.
‘Apart from the ending.’
I try to take a swig of beer but there’s just this great bubble of sorrow in my throat and I can’t get it down.
‘I know what you’re doing and I’m beyond tired, so just fuck off, will you?
’
‘Oh come on. Of course it’s tragic that Ling died, of course we’re sad about it, but we didn’t really know her, did we?
’
‘Harry loved her.’
‘Ling was very sweet, I agree, but we all know it was a marriage of convenience. She needed money, Harry needed a wife.’
Celia screams and drops a saucepan on the floor, and the baby creases up his face for a few seconds, like a time delay, and then starts yelling.
‘I hate you!’ It seems to burst out of her.
‘Oh fuck’s sake, Celia, calm down.
’
‘I hate the things you say. I hate who you are. You pretend that you’re this great guy, this great husband and father, this great friend, but really all you think about is yourself.
Harry’s wife just died and you don’t even care.
It means nothing to you.
You’re disgusting. You disgust me.
’
‘Sweetheart, that’s just not true.
Of course I care. Why are you getting so upset?
’
Jack moves towards her, but Celia screams.
‘Get away from me!’
She unsnaps the baby from his chair and grabs him into her arms.
‘Sorry about your eggs,’ she says, rocking him back and forth.
I shake my head. I can’t drink the beer or eat the eggs or find a single thing to say.
Except the words I have stuck in my head.
I hate you too, Jack. I hate you too.