27. Guest v. Finbow Day Five
GUEST V. FINBOW: DAY FIVE
Perhaps the greatest falsehood in my statement against Jean was that I found it difficult to lie. I’ve written that concealing my history with Mary, while keeping in contact with Jean over the Finbows’ legal strategies, caused me deep personal anguish. But that is a fiction.
There were moments of shame, of course, but it was frightening how easily I withheld things, the fluid ease with which I slipped into the roles Anna cast for me.
Her carer, but also someone to care for.
Sometimes, I think back to the word association game I played with Jean those years ago and the quietness that fell over her as she sketched a profile from my impulsive answers.
We both knew she had divined a darkness in me: a dishonesty that eventually became useful to her.
At the time, I loved her for perceiving it.
For seeing the mess of who I was, and loving me anyway.
But Jean’s love was never steady. The bright beam of her attention brutally shifted and dimmed.
When I got the job with Anna, I rushed to tell Jean, who began to answer my calls again.
In turn, I helped her wherever I could, with whatever I overheard at Anna’s, or could find.
But, as always, it wasn’t enough. My findings were never as sensational as Jean hoped they would be.
Anna and Bonamy were just two people clawing their way through an ambiguous loss they could neither grieve nor understand. Jean wanted more. She wanted dirt.
I began to feel that pressure again, the same feeling I’d had when we began our therapy, of not being able to come up with anything rich enough for her to exploit.
The mediocre findings, and then my growing affection for Anna—of course, Jean sensed it—began to frustrate her.
She withdrew. My calls went unanswered, while at the same time, my sympathy toward Anna deepened.
When I heard about Mary handing out the flyers in the Tube station, and knew that Jean was lying when she said she’d be giving any gains from the lawsuit to charity, I felt a revulsion toward her that I could no longer contain.
So it was a conscious decision to drop the perfume at Anna’s apartment.
Listening to the Finbows’ row, and watching their misery so close at hand, was unbearable.
I wanted the nightmare over. A wave of fear filled my mouth as Anna studied the tin, and I waited for her to make the connection.
It was Mary’s, of course. She used to dab it on her wrists and neck, then, maddeningly, into the tips of her hair.
I stole it because I missed her, carrying it with me like some tragic totem.
I dropped it to make her parents understand we had a history.
Where on earth did I find that? This was Anna’s question as she turned suddenly, her eyes still red from her tearful row. Adrenaline surged through me, then a steady pulse of relief. I could help this family now. I wanted to do whatever I could to support them.
“I stole it, Anna,” I replied calmly. “I opened the drawer of your kitchen dresser and I stole it.”
But they hadn’t taken me seriously. They both just laughed.
“Very good!” Bonamy roared, slapping the table. I could have shrunk to the ground with smallness. “Too funny,” he chuckled.
Anna joined in, shaking her head, saying, Mad girl , and pinching my arm.
There was a heat between the pair of them that lingered from their argument and which now reemerged as violent and carnivalesque.
Bonamy passed me my rucksack, then waved me off, chuckling still as he turned his attention back to his phone.
It hurt me that my connection to Mary was so far-fetched to them, it was laughable.
But I also felt embarrassed for resenting the fact I had been robbed of some moment of great revelation.
If we were still talking, Jean would have explained that I just wanted to be observed, another sign of the attention my parents had deprived me of.
When I imagined her words, and the forgiveness Jean would have shown me, I missed her, bitterly.
After that evening, I vowed to distance myself from the toxic triangle I had created.
June turned into July, and Anna returned to London.
Still, Jean and I were no longer in contact.
With Anna gone, for the first half of July, I stayed inside, avoiding the good weather and making very bad art that I put up for sale for cynical sums of money.
I searched online, desperately, for traces of Mary, in the background of other people’s photographs or even on music streaming sites.
I emailed Jean until I was blocked. Then wallowed in the shame of it.
I was always getting in my own way. Jean blocking me was just another sign of how I’d blocked myself.
Then an email arrived. Following that, a driver with a soft shoulder bag containing Quill.
Anna and Bonamy would be in Corfu until the end of August and wanted me to take care of him.
An envelope of money was tucked inside the bag, along with a gift basket of tatty crockery: seconds from her factory floor, which would have been hastily compiled by her team.
The Finbows never asked, they simply assumed I was available to help, but in a small way it tempered my guilt toward them.
I was glad to serve the family from a distance.
I composed many different emails over the rest of that summer, outlining the truth about my involvement with Jean, and what I had done.
When I didn’t send them, Quill was my excuse.
With no contact from Jean, he lightened my days and I depended on his company.
Knowing that, at the end of the summer, I would be returning him allowed me to put things off.
Soon it would be August. I would explain myself then.
Perhaps not all the story, but part of it.
Enough to offer my help for the Finbows’ case.
I didn’t yet feel able to admit everything Jean had made me do.
Anna messaged me as soon as their flight landed, asking me to bring Quill down from Stoke to London.
Stay for our party if you want!
It took me a moment to work out that Anna was referring to their annual carnival party.
The Notting Hill Carnival commemorated the neighborhood’s healing from brutal race riots in the 1970s.
But, for the Finbows, it was just an excuse for an event which was notoriously fun and, for a certain social set, a summer fixture, in the way that Glastonbury and opera festivals and tennis tournaments are. The show went on, even without Mary.
As I traveled down to London with Quill, I was ashamed by my curiosity, how quickly and compulsively I had accepted Anna’s invitation.
My excitement only grew as I made my way through the crowded neighborhoods and sound systems. The roads were already littered with crumpled cans of beer, leaflets for local churches and after-parties, cobs of corn that had been bitten bald.
Rain earlier in the day had produced that wet pavement smell mixed into other, richer carnival odors that were driving Quill wild: cooked meat and sticky hash.
He was strapped to my chest as we shuffled slowly through the dense crowds and approached Pembridge Villas.
Then, I began to notice the grander houses and the blond-hair Mary look-alikes standing in window frames, gazing down on the carnival like princesses in royal boxes.
When they danced past me on the street, they linked arms and threw their blond heads back in laughter, all confidence, plimsolls, and creaking leather jackets.
All Mary. We had to get her home, I pictured telling the Finbows that evening, after the party had wound down.
They would be shocked, of course, to learn about my past with Mary, but I would persuade them that I could help.
I harbored indulgent fantasies of the three of us sitting at the kitchen table together and concocting a rescue strategy.
Fantasies even I couldn’t quite bring myself to believe.
Eventually, I found the Finbows’ pink detached villa.
An ornate metal balcony ran along the width of the house at first-floor level, and its porch was covered in heaving wisteria.
Of course, it wasn’t my first visit to the Finbows’ London house.
In the month after I returned from Rome, I had, on occasion, waited nearby for Mary, a sad hangdog in her pursuit.
Now, there was a weightless thrill to be making my way up the pink front steps and pressing the bell.
“Gussie! And my hound!” Bonamy opened the door.
From downstairs, I heard laughter and music, but the look on his face made me realize the invite had come from Anna.
“So good of you to come!” He had bottles of wine in each hand, which he passed to Clover as he brought Quill and me inside and strode down the wooden-floored hallway.
“We’re just out in the garden playing a game.
Come and join us. Clover, take her jacket, will you? ”
I followed him down into a beautiful, dark green kitchen, with a domed glass roof overhead.
Clover busied herself in the fridge, showing something to the caterers, while I lingered awkwardly near the entrance to the garden.
It was just like the Finbows, I thought, not to sense the bad optics of throwing a party like this, so close to the trial.
Venturing out into the garden, I encountered at least a hundred people.
They just partied on , as Mary used to say.
“Let’s find you something to drink.” Bonamy beamed, placing a warm hand on my shoulder and guiding me through the crowd.