29. Sunnymede, Saturday
SUNNYMEDE, SATURDAY
The entrance to Mary’s squat is marked by a hand-painted sign and two wheelbarrows filled with old flowerpots and bits of driftwood.
Welcome to Sunnymede.
“Everything all right?” She smiles dreamily.
“I’m here to visit someone,” I stammer, feeling conspicuous in my clean clothes. “Mary Finbow?”
The girl’s expression falls. She eyes me with suspicion. “You’re not the health visitor, are you?”
“No,” I say, shaking my head. “A friend.” She hesitates and twists her fingers in her hands. “Of Jean’s.”
Her name is a crude password. The girl points in the distance, toward a second clearing.
“Right at the top there. Head through the trees, there’s a few more cabins. Can’t remember which one’s hers. If I were you, I’d just shout.”
“Does she live alone?” I ask, suddenly nervous of what I might encounter.
The woman raises her palms to the sky as if feeling for drops of rain and shrugs. “None of us do.”
Her directions lead to a line of four cabins with sloping, corrugated-iron roofs and flattened plastic bottles peeking from gaps.
The state of this place , I think, remembering the frescoed walls of Mary’s apartment in Rome; its silky, wide bed; her daily housekeeper.
In court, Mary described this place as “simpler,” but how did she fit in here?
How could she tolerate it? My evidence in court on Monday takes on a frightening significance: If Jean wins her case, she’ll retain Mary’s other properties, consigning her and the baby to this dump forever.
“Mary?” My voice echoes, hopelessly, in the clearing.
No response. Only the twitter of birdsong between the grind of plane engines flying low overhead.
A brief image returns: how excitedly I would stand outside her apartment on the Lungotevere for the sight of Mary’s long brown legs in her pajama shorts when she opened the door.
The fruit smell of her when she brought me inside.
We were something , I remind myself as I search the desolate surroundings.
The two of us had something. A future. When she sees me, she’ll remember.
Then, from behind me, the sound of twigs, snapping underfoot.
“Hello?” she calls in a voice that, although thinner and airier, is still recognizably hers.
I spin around. There is Mary, emerging from the trees.
I raise my hand, so struck by the sight of her that I can’t speak.
She looks like a park ranger, in a pair of worn chinos and a murky green jumper.
The brown boots on her feet are carelessly laced, and in one hand, she leads a thin, trembling dog—perhaps a whippet—on a length of neon rope.
In the other, she holds a packet of tissues. She stumbles as she sees me.
“It’s you,” she says.
“It’s me,” I say, and smile, but something inside me has splintered.
Mary checks around nervously. “Who told you I was here?”
“Can we go and talk somewhere?”
“How did you find me?”
“Five minutes, Mary. That’s all.”
We stand facing each other. Mary stays rooted a couple of meters away in the tall grass, like a shy animal. “I promise you, it’s just me. No one else.”
She begins to walk toward me. “You’ve actually caught me on a really busy day.”
“Mary,” I say, “please.”
“I’m really sorry,” she says briskly, folding her arms against her stomach. With a shoot of pain, I register its swollen curve. “Now isn’t a good time.”
I take another step toward her. “Please.”
At that moment, the whippet starts barking: a high-pitched bowing sound. “She doesn’t like strangers,” Mary says, squatting down and cradling the animal’s juddering jaw. “You’re making her really anxious.” She hushes the dog for a moment longer, then sighs. “You better come in.”
Mary’s hut is warm and dry but in a dense, organic way, like the inside of a vegetable drawer.
Toward the back of the room is a wood-burning stove, and a cardboard box, which the dog picks her way into.
Mary busies herself making tea, and the dog watches us with seal-like eyes, a whine caught in her throat.
“Comfy bed,” I comment as the kettle hisses and chimes to a boil.
Once again, I am back in Rome, propped against the headboard, watching Mary get ready for a party or dinner I wasn’t invited to.
The tantalizing sight of her body as she wriggled into her clothes, admiring herself in the mirror, before snake-hipping out of them and opting for something else.
Today, Mary bears no resemblance to that girl.
There is an intense nervousness about her.
A guarded, simmering paranoia. She washed her hands for a long time after we first came in, drying each finger individually. Her gaze falls anywhere but on me.
“Biscuit?”
I accept as she lowers her pregnant form onto a lambswool blanket to sit cross-legged on the floor, about a meter from the bed, and within arm’s reach of the dog.
I check around for any photographs or paintings of her own, but there are none.
Nor can I see any objects which might signal she is shortly due to give birth: no cot prepared, or maternity vitamins, or guides to surviving labor.
The only books around are self-help tomes—many of which Jean had also encouraged me to read—arranged on the rotten windowsill.
Other than that, the setup is hopelessly monastic.
The walls are bare, except for a sign near the entrance which reads: The first step to a better world is the belief that it is possible.
“Does anyone else live here?” I ask, aching to know about the baby’s father.
“In the other cabins? Mainly creatives. Some travelers. It’s nice.”
The biscuit forms stale clumps in my mouth as I think of Jean. How powerful she was, and how completely sick, to set her prized client up somewhere like this and convince her she was happy.
“You’re up north now?” She smirks. “Working for my family ?”
“Did Jean tell you that?”
Mary throws me another withering look. “We both found it pretty disturbing that you’d actively seek them out. But it’s your life. Your journey.”
Jean’s treachery makes me want to scream. After everything I’d tried to do to help her case, Jean has portrayed me to Mary as some fame-hungry hanger-on. I open my mouth to defend myself, then decide against it. Later, I will explain.
“I wanted to find you after court the other day. To say congratulations.” I gesture to the bump.
She tosses her head. “That’s what you came all the way here to tell me?”
“I’ve tried text,” I say coolly. “You never respond.”
Mary laughs bitterly. A fresh wave of anger builds. I point carelessly at her pelvis. “So Jean lets you have boyfriends now?” Mary ignores the question, concentrating on fishing something out of her cup of tea. I press her again. “Doesn’t he live with you?”
“There’s no dad, Gussie,” Mary explains quietly. “No boyfriend. This was an accident. One night. I went out on my own and drank. It was a lapse. I regressed. I’m lucky to have Jean’s support.”
“A total stranger? And you never considered letting it go?” Mary shakes her head as if the idea revolts her. “Why not?” I say, exasperated. “You’re letting your own life go to waste, aren’t you?” Mary says nothing. “You know, when I first heard you were pregnant, I wondered if it was Lawrence’s.”
Mary surveys me with disbelief. Her eyes grow an instant film of tears that fall down her face. From the right eye first, then the left. She swipes at them with a knuckle.
“Fuck you, Gussie,” she whispers. “Fuck you, for even mentioning his name.”
I shift from the bed to the floor so that we are facing each other. “Sorry,” I say gently. “I don’t know why I had to bring him up.”
Although I did know. In the recording yesterday, I had watched as Jean guided me toward conclusions that were falsely overblown.
There was no doubting Lawrence and Mary’s relationship: I had seen them together with my own eyes.
But when Jean insinuated that her parents knew about the affair, hadn’t this also suited her aims?
In fabricating a far darker tale of their complicity, Mary became bound to her.
“I’m working to forgive Lawrence,” Mary says. “With Jean.”
I reach for her hands. “Mary, you know what they’re saying Jean does, right? That she makes people believe things happened that never occurred at all?”
My question hangs limply in the air. Mary stares at me, livid.
“Here we go,” Mary says. “Someone else who doesn’t want to believe me. How can you question this?” She shudders. “You even saw us. ”
“I know you were together,” I say soothingly. “But I don’t think other people did—”
“I think it’s time you left, Gus.”
“I’m just scared Jean has convinced you of something far worse than…” I say, then leave a pause, aware of how tenuous it sounds. “Than the reality. Does she tell you about bad stuff in your past? Stuff that you’ve apparently forgotten?”
“We don’t forget anything, Gus. We just can’t—”
“ Bear to remember? She used that line on me, too.”
Chastened, Mary brings her knees to her chest. I inch closer.
“I need you to listen to me now. Jean is dangerous . Just look at what happened to Oriel, how Jean broke her down with all her lies about her family. And now she’s dead. I’m not trying to doubt you, but as your friend I owe you the truth—”
“ Friends? We’re not friends, Gus.” Mary’s eyes glint with angry tears. “When I told you about him, you called me disgusting!”
“I could never be disgusted with you,” I say quietly, my head hanging low. “Not ever.”
“Then where were you?” she storms. “You let me down, just like my parents did!”
My temper flares. “ You’re the one who disappeared. You stopped picking up my messages. You left Rome without even telling me!”