Chapter 46.
Now
I’ve arranged to meet Lara at her mum’s house. Before I’ve even had a chance to ring the bell, Corinne opens the door, enveloping me in a hug. Felix is standing in the hallway behind her. From within Corinne’s grasp, I raise my hand and nod. He meets my eye, smiles softly, and nods right back.
She looks even older than I’d been expecting, and she feels fragile in my arms, more bone than flesh. Exhaustion clings to her like smoke. Her cropped hair is almost white now, and her skin has the texture of cigarette paper. But she still has her trademark suntan, even though it’s nearly Christmas. I smile as I recall the Corinne I knew years ago, who would dash hopefully outside in a bikini whenever the centigrade hit twenty.
‘I’ve missed you, darling girl,’ she murmurs into my hair. She smells exactly how I remember, a cloud of coal tar soap and Estée Lauder.
‘I’m so sorry about Billy,’ I say, my voice flimsy with emotion. I think about watching them dance in the kitchen, late at night, to ‘At Last’.
I wonder if that was their song, if they played it at Billy’s funeral. But I don’t ask.
Corinne squeezes me harder, and after a couple of moments I realise it’s because she can’t speak. Behind her, Felix puts a silent hand on her shoulder.
Eventually, she pulls out of the hug and manages to say, ‘How’s your mum, Neve?’
‘Same as ever.’
‘I still think of her, sometimes.’ Then she tells me Felix is taking her out for lunch. ‘I’m being spoilt,’ she says, smiling.
I stare at them. ‘Oh, I...’ I thought I was here to see you . Have there been crossed wires? Is this something to do with Felix? ‘Please don’t leave on my account.’
‘Not at all,’ he says, graciously, as Corinne puts on a coat. ‘Nice to see you again, Neve.’
I must have misunderstood.
Just before Corinne shuts the door behind her, she gives me a funny look, one I can’t quite interpret. ‘Lara never stopped loving you, Neve, you know.’
‘I never stopped loving her, either,’ I say, realising the raw, unprocessed truth of it only in this moment.
As the door closes, Lara appears in the hallway. ‘Hey. Come through.’
I step back in time a decade, to the last time I was here. The living room is just as cosy as I remember. It has been decorated for Christmas, draped in greenery and baubles and rivers of sparkling lights. The tree is a six-foot feast of colour. Corinne’s Christmases were always the best.
But year-round too, this room was a treasure trove of fresh flowers and blankets and pairs of slippers and bowls filled with boiled sweets and thick piles of newspapers and shiny magazines, and today is no different. There is a radio playing, tuned to a succession of jangling Christmas songs.
Lara makes tea and we move to the sofa. The room is stuffy, like they’ve had the heating cranked up to max for days on end, but Lara still pulls a blanket over her lap. She is make-up free and looks drained, as though someone’s syringed the energy right out of her.
I still haven’t got to the bottom of exactly what’s wrong with Corinne. I should have asked at the door. I’m sure she would have told me. But her lunch plans threw me – I’d been expecting her to be here.
‘I thought... I wanted to have a chat with your mum,’ I say.
Lara tuts fondly, like her mum and Felix are for ever cavorting around Norwich enjoying long lunches. ‘I know. Sorry about that. But Felix suggested taking her out, and I think it was a good idea, actually. So you and I can talk.’
‘Okay.’ I try a smile, though I feel unsettled in a way I can’t quite put my finger on.
‘Recognise these?’ Lara says, passing me a tea.
It breaks the tension perfectly. I laugh. The slogan mugs from our first night at uni, the ones we drank Jamie’s mum’s champagne from. A little faded, but still as ridiculous as they were back then. ‘I can’t believe you kept them all this time.’
‘Are you kidding? These are seriously precious mementoes.’
‘Lar.’ Her name rushes from my mouth before I’m fully ready. ‘Be straight with me. What’s wrong with Corinne?’
She meets my eye. ‘I’ll tell you in a minute. First... how’s it going with Ash?’
‘No – never mind Ash. Tell me now.’
‘No, Neve. This is important.’
‘My relationship woes are not more important than your mum being ill. Tell me.’
‘I will. But first... please just humour me.’
I shake my head, slightly bemused. ‘Okay, but... there’s not a lot to tell. Ash and I still haven’t spoken.’ I fill her in on my counsellor, and the slowly growing list of the ways in which Ash and Jamie do differ, and the many nights I’ve lain in bed wondering if it’s possible that my theory has been built on false assumptions. That all these incredible coincidences could really be just that. Coincidence.
And yet, somehow, my mind always ends up tugging me back to Jamie. He is still moored to my heart. I can’t bring myself to fully dismiss the idea that he might have come home, that perhaps we have been given a chance to revive the love story we never got to finish.
‘Okay,’ Lara says, when I’m done. She sets down her tea, folds her hands in her lap. ‘Neve, I have to tell you something.’
I can hear from her voice it’s the kind of something that might make a person want to run into traffic.
‘It kills me to have to say this to you, especially after... the baby, and everything you went through with that. And... all the stuff that happened when Jamie died.’
In my mind, a jolt of renewed grief. Or maybe it’s fear.
‘It’s about Jamie.’
Even after so much time, hearing someone else say his name still makes my heart lurch.
She shudders out a breath. ‘God, this is so hard.’
‘Lara...’ I begin, but then something about her expression stops me.
‘Neve, I haven’t ever told you this because I know that what happened pretty much ruined your life. And I didn’t want to add to your pain. Please know that I only withheld it because I didn’t want to hurt you any more than I already had.’
‘You’re scaring me now.’
‘Jamie . . . was cheating on you.’
Everything blurs. I feel the world tilt beneath me. I stare at her, hot astonishment behind my eyes.
‘He... was seeing someone else. A girl called Heather. She worked at that firm he interned at.’
Heather . The name that is still, infuriatingly, branded onto my brain.
A hurricane of fragmented memories – of phone calls and excuses, times he brushed away my questions – begins to blow through me.
‘Jamie told me in the car that night. Just before he died.’
The room seems to shrink suddenly, like the walls and ceiling are closing in. I struggle for a few moments to focus, form thoughts, draw breath. ‘No, Lar.’
She just shakes her head, like, I’m sorry .
‘ No .’ I cover my mouth, trying not to cry out with shock and pain. Jamie, no. Not you. Not this. Not us.
Lara sets a hand on her chest, like it’s physically paining her to tell me this. ‘He told me everything because he was a coward and he couldn’t face confessing to you. He actually asked me to tell you for him. But after he died, and I saw how broken you were... I couldn’t bring myself to do it.’
The realisation hits me like a truck. That everything I thought about Jamie and me – and the life and future we’d lost – is turning out to have been a lie.
‘He’d figured out a plan to do the last year of his course in London. He was planning to leave Norwich and move in with her, while you were out of the house.’
‘Why?’ I say, my voice wrenched with anguish.
But I know it is too tiny and inadequate a word for such a huge, fathomless question.
‘He said you’d told him you wanted to try for another baby. But he wasn’t ready. He kept saying you wanted different things from life, that he did think he was being held back by staying in Norwich. All that stuff. With the flat and London and Heather... his head was just turned.’
Cold, blunt devastation lands inside me. This, unequivocally, is proof she is telling the truth. I’ve never repeated to anyone that conversation I had with Jamie, about trying to get pregnant again.
Lara pulls her mustard-yellow cardigan more closely around her. I have no idea how she isn’t sweating. ‘What Jamie was saying to you and what he was doing with Heather were two completely different things. I’m so sorry, Neve.’
On the radio, the music switches to Coldplay. ‘Christmas Lights’. My heart aches in time to it. I swallow back wave after wave of sadness, fresh grief, the startling knife-wound of betrayal.
‘All those weekends during term-time when he went back to London, claiming he was with his dad in Putney... he was with her. For almost a whole year.’
No. Not Jamie. No.
‘Jamie was a cheater. A liar. A coward. The truth is... he didn’t even come close to deserving you.’
I think back to what Meena said to me about Jamie, only a few days ago. If you were to meet him today, there’s a chance you might not even recognise him .
I set down my cooling tea on the coffee table. The slogan on the mug is like a taunt: CUP OF POSITIVI-TEA . I feel the abrupt urge to fling it at a wall. I want to break everything.
‘Did Jamie’s dad know? His mum?’
Lara nods, silently.
I picture Chris, the contempt with which he used to look at me. ‘But... why did they never say anything? They would have relished the chance to see the back of me. God, I even wrote to them a few times, afterwards.’
Lara swallows. ‘Well, to be honest, it turns out we had that wrong. Jamie admitted they never disliked you, not really. He was the one raising doubts, saying he wasn’t sure. They argued about it, sometimes. They thought he should come clean with you.’
‘No. His mum... she offered to pay me, to get rid of the baby.’
Lara looks down at her lap. She already knows this, I realise. ‘I guess he’d made it clear things weren’t going to last between you.’
I think of my own mother, the things she used to mutter to herself as she paced the house after my father left. Idiot... open your eyes... right in front of you... wake up, Daniela!
‘At the end of the day, Jamie was a coward,’ Lara says. ‘And after he died... no doubt his parents wanted everyone to remember him as an angel, not a liar and a cheat. So they never said anything. I mean, that’s how you’ve thought of him all these years, isn’t it? Saint Jamie.’
I don’t reply. The power of speech has left me completely. I still can’t seem to square the idea of it – Jamie being in love with someone else. Sleeping with someone else. Lying to me, every single day for twelve months. Maybe more. And behaving the whole time like he was deeply in love with me.
Slightly dazed, I try to recall how many times Jamie and I were physically intimate during that year. A hundred, maybe? More?
How the hell could I have got it so wrong?
I feel a violent swirl of nausea, bile biting the back of my throat.
‘I swear I’m not saying any of this to hurt you, Neve. But the truth is, I can’t bear to see you chuck away what you have with Ash for the sake of someone who – let’s face it – was not in love with you. Ash is a good guy . If you needed proof that he isn’t Jamie, then this is it. No scientists required. And this is going to sound harsh, but if Jamie was coming back to life for anyone, then... it would be her, and not you.’
These words do a fresh number on my gut. I turn my face away.
‘Let Heather have his ghost,’ Lara whispers.
But how do I explain how mad and impossible that sounds to me, even now, because for the best part of a decade, I have been gripped by loving and grieving and revering the memory of this man? How do I make her see the agonising humiliation of realising I have compared every potential partner to someone who never actually loved me? That I have been worshipping at the altar of a cheat and a liar? How can I possibly convey how horrified I feel to have wasted so much precious time?
‘Were you angry, when he told you?’ My voice sounds low and lifeless now, crushed flat by the weight of our conversation.
Lara nods. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever been that angry. In fact, me raging at him would have been one of the last things he—’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ A sob clambers into my mouth. ‘You could have... messaged, or emailed. You could have just let me know, so I wouldn’t have wasted the last decade of my life obsessing about someone who—’
‘I did message, and email. I asked if we could meet, but you never replied.’
I swallow, and look down. This, of course, is true. Besides which, the blame for all this lies only with one person. And it is not Lara.
‘Anyway. I should probably say, I didn’t believe you, when you said you thought Ash was some kind of reincarnation of Jamie. For reasons that I hope are obvious now. But I desperately wanted my best friend back, and I thought if I argued with you, that might not happen.’ She shuffles up straighter, taking my hand with hers. It feels oddly bony in my grip. ‘You have to see that this... This is good information . It means you can finally move on from the past. Because Jamie was, unequivocally, an arsehole.’
The tears start to fall now. ‘It’s not as simple as that. I can’t... ask him why. I can’t get angry, because there’s nowhere for it to go. I just have to accept that he did this. But how can I, when he – what we had – meant everything to me?’
Lara doesn’t reply.
I glance over at her, and realise with surprise that her eyes have fluttered closed. She almost looks as though she’s drifted off to sleep. Christ, she must be exhausted. ‘Hey, are you okay?’ I say, putting a hand on her arm.
She starts. ‘Say again?’
I feel a strange urge to laugh. Disbelief maybe, that Lara – a person who’s always had seemingly boundless energy – could have dropped off as we were talking, in the middle of the day. ‘Are you okay?’
Swallowing, she shifts slightly, nods. ‘Sorry. Yeah. Not sure what happened there.’
She looks strangely vulnerable suddenly, and I remember with a jolt of bitterness how privately grateful I’d felt that I had Jamie, the night a married man nearly hurt her.
‘Anyway, look,’ Lara says, ‘there’s actually another reason I wanted to get this all off my chest. And this... This does feel a bit more complicated.’
Something cold forms a ball in my stomach, and I know straight away that it is fear.
She starts to talk, and incredibly, my world turns even darker than before.