26. Guest v. Finbow Day Five #2
Jean sipped her wine. “I am, too.” For a moment, she fell quiet. “None of this has been easy on me, either, Gus. It’s taking such a lot out of me.” She adjusted her glasses to dab at the tears that had formed. “Some of the early memories that Mary’s retrieving are very disturbing.”
“You mean about Lawrence?” I said. Jean looked pointedly at her hands. I felt my rage flare. “Shouldn’t she be speaking to her parents?”
A bitter expression crossed Jean’s face.
“Telling them won’t help, Gus. They’re the biggest part of the problem.
We both know what those kinds of families are like.
It’s all about outward appearances. From what she’s telling me, they completely ignored the situation.
They just pretended it wasn’t happening.
They neglected her when she needed them most.”
The kitchen grew smaller, no longer warm but uncomfortably overheated.
I brought a hand to my neck, remembering the Finbows’ funding of Lawrence’s school, her mother’s acceptance of Lawrence’s kiss.
Then Mary’s words in the nightclub: It wouldn’t surprise me if she already knew .
How evil of Anna Finbow, I thought, to look the other way and ignore what was inconvenient.
Just as my own mother had flatly ignored what she perceived as a problem in me.
My whole being ached for Mary then. I wanted so much to console her.
To tell her I had known that rejection, too.
Jean rose from the table and went over to the sink. “I shouldn’t have told you that, Gus, I’m sorry—”
“No,” I said, still stunned. “Thank you for telling me.”
She turned to the sink. “I hope it explains why Mary needs—the silence—”
“Yes,” I said uncertainly. “It does help. The context. Thank you.”
“It’s you I should thank, for recommending me. Now I can help her.”
That word jarred on me: recommending . I felt a growing shame for engineering a situation that was causing me pain—a pattern Jean had told me I must break.
I tried to ask more questions, but Jean insisted it wasn’t right to discuss Mary any longer.
Instead, she poured me another glass of wine and tried to engage me on different matters, but the conversation often felt forced and one-sided.
She was acting so polite that I began to feel a creeping sickness, as if I was being dumped.
We talked about the room I had rented in Archway and what I might try to do now that I was back.
Her own offer of a home with her glided by, unmentioned.
“That reminds me!” Jean took out her phone and sent me a link to a news story about a program for ceramicists in the north of the country. I stared at her in disbelief.
“Stoke-on-Trent?”
“They’re selling studios in the old pottery factories really cheaply.”
“But it’s so far away?”
“Live-in studios. With other artists. When I read about it, you sprang immediately to mind. You’re never far from my mind. I said to myself, ‘Now that would be absolutely perfect for Gus!’?”
I paused to read a few lines of the article. “Stoke,” I repeated. “Isn’t that where Mary’s mum’s business is based?”
A lopsided smile passed across Jean’s face. “Oddly enough, yes. Not that you’d ever see her, I expect.” She paused. “Not unless you wanted to.”
I turned the screen of my phone over. “I can’t move there,” I stammered. “I’d be hundreds of miles from you.”
“You did the same thing when you went to Rome, and look how well you did! When I saw the piece, I thought it was fate. I said to myself, ‘Just think what that could mean for her work!’?”
“What about our work?”
There was another awkward pause. Jean removed her glasses and blinked at me with her naked, mouselike eyes. In an instant, I was back in Mr. Greening’s office, facing my teacher, my parents, all their grave and angry faces. A pain rose up into my chest.
“I think we might need a break from each other,” Jean said curtly. “Just for a little while.”
Her words burned my ears. Here was the moment I knew, instinctively, was coming. Jean was ending things.
“My work has to take priority, Gus. Mary has to take priority. You understand that, don’t you?
You know she’s in trouble. We have to make sacrifices.
” There was a pause. The walls around me began to slide slowly backward.
“And I have to be a little bit selfish here, Gus,” she said, then chuckled. “I have to make a proper living.”
I couldn’t speak. It shamed me, how little I had paid her.
“I can pay more,” I whispered eventually. “Get a job again. I can match the others—”
“See what happens in Stoke, perhaps. When you get an income going…” As she trailed off, she opened her arms for a hug. “You do know how much I’ll miss you, don’t you?” she said, bringing me close. “And I promise it won’t be forever.”
“How long?” I whispered through tears, wanting to remain there, safe in her smell.
“You’re such a strong girl, Gus,” she said, releasing me, but ignoring my question.
“I’m so proud of how you’ve grown.” Briefly, she held my chin as tears poured down my face.
“But sometimes the hardest part of loving someone is also letting them go.” She nodded as she said this, to make it clear she was also referring to Mary. “Do you understand me?”
When Jean offered a bed for the night, I grasped the invitation with a sense of bleak, defeated nostalgia, combined with foreboding: She was like a lover proposing one last intimacy before we separated.
She showed me to a single bedroom with textured walls, just off the kitchen.
I felt a queasy contentedness because, as she prepared me for sleep, things were almost feeling normal again. Almost.
The bed was dressed in fussy peach linen, all tucked in around the edges.
She switched on the heated blanket and gave me a pill to help me go to sleep.
When she turned off the light, leaving without kissing me, I remembered Mary and Jean, both complaining about my phone calls.
Mortified, I turned to the wall and covered my face with my hands. Then I shrieked with pain.
Not long after dawn, there was the sound of the doorbell, a violent rapping of her letter box, and what I thought was a woman’s voice shouting through it. I rolled over and covered my ears from the sound.
“Who was at the door this morning?” I said later as I tucked into the elaborate breakfast Jean had cooked.
I remember eating it slowly, wanting to delay our separation.
I had no idea then where I would go next.
The stark truth was that I had blown the last of my savings on that miserable trip to Venice.
London was unaffordable for me now. Jean’s suggestion of Stoke was starting to seem like a valid alternative.
“No one was at the door,” snapped Jean. She was standing at the stove, writing a message on her phone. “Now, eat up. I’ve got a client in ten minutes.”
My throat hardened as I cut down into my bacon. I was unable to say what I was thinking: that now that I was awake, I was fairly certain, even beneath the haze of my sleeping pill, that I had heard something very specific. A girl’s name, over and over.
A woman—a mother—calling for Oriel.
The voice belonged to Lucy Ayres. As she stands here in court, I realize that, of course, it was her outside Jean’s door in that early dawn, banging and shouting through the letter box. Several months later, Oriel tried to sever herself from Jean, just as I have tried and failed to do.
“We wanted to reintegrate Oriel back into normal life,” Lucy explains.
“But how do you recover from such complex manipulation? Jean turned Oriel’s childhood into a horror movie.
She was tortured by what she had been made to believe.
At the same time, she also felt completely foolish for absorbing all the lies. ”
Ms. Carr draws parallels between Oriel’s experiences and those of other individuals who have left cult organizations.
“In your bundle, your lordship, we have summarized a number of cult exit studies. It is very common for recovering cult members to fall into deep despair while trying to recommence life outside of their restrictive regime. Many individuals suffer from feelings of worthlessness and shame about what they have endured. They experience drug addiction, depression, and even suicide.” The lawyer pauses to take a sip of water.
There is a hollowness in my chest as I consider the starkness of the road ahead.
My future, without Jean playing any role in it.
“Do you recognize these behaviors in your late daughter’s experience? ”
Lucy swallows. “Back at home, Oriel became severely depressed and withdrawn. She still craved Ms. Guest’s company like a drug. She never got over the absence.”
My stomach churns with recognition: Neither will I .
Ms. Carr proceeds gently. “Is it your evidence that these experiences contributed to your daughter’s death by suicide?”
A painful hush falls over the gallery. Justice Larkin leans forward. “Take whatever time you need, Mrs. Ayres… we know how difficult this must be.”
Lucy presses her lips with her hand. “I’m still coming to terms with the why. It was barely a month ago. She said she was going to Notting Hill Carnival with a friend. We were happy for her. It was the first time in years.”
“Where did she go instead?”
“She took a train to Brighton. Walked a long way up the beach. Waited until it was dark. Placed stones into the pockets of her coat and waded into the sea.”
Tears streak my face. I picture Oriel clutching at the fistfuls of rocks. Her defiant gasp as she is dragged under. Behind her lawyer’s desk, Jean emits a quiet sob. The judge frowns.
“To clarify,” Ms. Carr ventures softly. “Is it your evidence that your daughter’s tragic suicide this August, and Ms. Guest’s influence, are connected?”
“Of course they are. It takes time—a dreadfully long time—to come to terms with the fact that you have not been loved, but exploited. A month before she died, my daughter even tried to make amends with Ms. Guest.”
“Why was that?”
“She had made a statement for Mrs. Finbow, but was terrified about being questioned over it. The prospect of standing up in front of her abuser was just too much. You see, my daughter’s dependency on Ms. Guest was never really severed. Not until—”
Suddenly, I have heard enough. I rise from my seat and grasp my way to the exit, hearing a horrifying echo in everything Lucy Ayres has said.
On Monday, I am due to speak against Jean, but how will I manage it?
Stumbling through the grand atrium, my mind conjures images of Oriel’s floating, lifeless body.
Her corpse morphs into my own, then Mary’s.
Frail Mary, gripping on to her baby girl.
Mary is so dependent on Jean, I have no idea how she will cope without her. Isn’t it reckless to break them apart?
Striding away from the courthouse, I take out my phone and begin reading the statement I have submitted against Jean.
I imagine her listening to it, those watchful eyes moving rapidly, as they always did when I recounted my memories.
I can even hear her voice, telling me that this isn’t really the truth, just another false narrative I’m telling myself.
She’s tutting and calling me out for self-sabotage.
For that weak way I always cave to external voices, endlessly seeking the approval of others. She offers her own threatening insight:
You know I dreamt about this happening, Gus. I had a very vivid dream that one day you’d betray me.
Like any self-appointed messiah, Jean often spoke of my betrayal, wielding it as both prophecy and threat. As I consider defying her, those words pierce through me again. I always laughed away Jean’s paranoia. I always promised it would never happen.
I exit the statement and instead open an email to the Finbows’ legal team. Not yet , I think. Not Monday. I can’t do it. Jean asked for my dedication and I gave it.
With shaking hands, I type out a long email to Anna’s lawyers. It starts with an apology.