Chapter 11 Martin #4
‘Your schooldays,’ Bitsy says. She is now ensconced in an armchair, the hideous skirt obscuring most of the upholstery. Jarvis stands behind her like a security guard, but he’s not looking down at his wife. He’s looking at Serena.
‘Ah, ancient history,’ Ben says. ‘My favourite subject.’
He takes Serena’s hand in his. She flinches. Ben pretends not to notice. But I notice. Because the Little Shadow notices everything.
‘Ready for the debate, Ben?’ Jarvis says.
‘Mm? Oh yeah. All good,’ Ben says. ‘Our prep session really helped, so thanks for that, mate.’
I imagine Jarvis and Ben locked away together in an office.
Ben prowling around a conference table, gesturing with his hands as he reels off policies with practised charisma.
Jarvis barking out questions to him about what he thinks of Brexit, how to address the cost-of-living crisis and what on earth can be done about immigration.
‘I don’t know why everything has to be televised nowadays,’ Bitsy says. ‘It’s all got to be on a screen, hasn’t it? I see it with our girls. Constantly on their phones, scrolling and TokTikking—’
‘TikTok,’ I interject.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘It’s called TikTok.’
‘Really?’ Bitsy asks. ‘How would you know? You don’t have children, do you?’
I shake my head.
‘I didn’t think so,’ she says, eyes narrowing. ‘Your type doesn’t.’
Serena, suddenly alert, turns to Bitsy and says, ‘I’m sorry, you can’t just—’
‘My “type”?’ I say, making exaggerated quotation marks with my fingers. ‘What do you mean by that?’
Jarvis shoots me a furious look.
‘Well it should be perfectly obvious,’ Bitsy says, her neck flushing.
I clench my left hand into a fist.
‘I don’t quite follow.’
I tilt my head and make my face clueless.
‘I think what Martin is saying …’ Ben starts. I wave his words away.
‘Please, Ben, let Bitsy finish.’
‘Whatever you’re calling yourselves these days.’ Bitsy takes a gulp of her drink. ‘I don’t know. Queer. Gay.’ She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. ‘Faggot.’
The word slices across the room. I put down my glass and walk out, closing the door behind me and wait for a few seconds with my ear pressed against the wood to hear what they’re saying.
‘You simply cannot use words like that anymore, Bitsy,’ Serena is protesting. ‘It’s offensive.’
‘God, poor Martin,’ Ben adds. ‘That was really—’
The rest of his sentence is swallowed by Jarvis’s booming voice: ‘Poor Martin, my arse. He deserves it. He’s always been so fucking superior. And don’t even get me started on that suit! Why’s he dressed like a footballer?’
‘Shut up, Jarvis,’ Ben says. ‘Martin is who he is and whatever you might think of him, he’s also one of my closest friends.’
‘So that’s what you’re calling it,’ Jarvis replies, but his voice has lost its fight.
‘Well,’ Bitsy says. ‘I thought everyone knew what he was.’
She really is an appalling little bigot, I think. And then: Ben defended me. I experience neither anger nor triumph as I walk back towards the kitchen for a glass of water.
Joanne Buster once told me I didn’t process emotions like other people.
She accused me of an absence of feeling.
She didn’t put it quite like that, of course.
She did the usual therapist’s thing of asking questions, scattering the breadcrumbs of a diagnosis to lead me down a trail of self-discovery.
‘Might I make an observation, Martin?’ she said, head cocked, beaded earrings dangling.
I nodded, bracing myself for whatever onslaught of stupidity Joanne was about to unleash.
‘I’ve noticed that whenever I ask how an event has made you feel – and sometimes it’s a very traumatic event – you don’t reply with an emotional response but rather with a thought response. It comes from your intellect. Not your heart.’ She paused. ‘How does that land?’
It lands like the least subtle Boeing 737 flown by the world’s most stupid pilot, Joanne, is what I didn’t say.
‘I’m not sure I understand the distinction,’ is what I did.
She went on to tell me that when I spoke about my father dying, or the times my mother had beaten me or the bullying I had experienced at school, I didn’t ever talk about sadness. Instead I spoke ‘very matter-of-factly’ about the events and then moved on to what I had done next.
‘Often, what you did next was revenge-based,’ she said. ‘As if you did feel something but didn’t want to admit it. You struggled to process the emotion, on some level. You pushed it down. Like the bird.’
I’d been expelled from primary school after I had killed an injured bird with a rock. I had done it because the other children, with their fawning but entirely ineffectual concern, had irritated me. The bird was in pain and I had ended its suffering. At the time, it seemed perfectly logical to me.
‘But, you know, it strikes me now that perhaps you weren’t just angry that your classmates cared about the bird,’ Joanne carried on. ‘Perhaps you were annoyed that no one cared about you and this was your way of saying that?’
I remembered killing the bird because I wanted to. Couldn’t we just leave it at that?
‘It’s OK, Martin,’ she said. ‘I can see I’ve touched a nerve.’
The studied calmness in her voice made me even more irritated.
‘Not everyone experiences emotion in the same way. In fact, some very successful people find that being able to make decisions exclusively from the head rather than the heart’ – at this point, she actually signalled to both her head and her heart, as if I needed help understanding the difference – ‘is a real advantage. But with you, I don’t think it’s that you don’t have the emotions.
I think it’s that your defence mechanism refuses to allow you to feel them.
And that’s why your responses can sometimes be …
well …’ She gave a nauseatingly sympathetic smile.
‘Unexpected. Because, deep down, I think there’s part of you that’s scared of what you feel, of the vulnerability of it.
And that’s really what we’re talking about here, isn’t it? ’
She let the question float between us.
‘What’s that?’ I asked.
‘Shame,’ she said, staring straight at me.
In the Tipworth kitchen, the eldest child is still folded up on the sofa, a mass of angles and unbrushed hair. Her black jeans have rips across the knees and the flesh beneath is as pale as moonlight. She looks up as I enter.
‘Hi,’ she says, immediately returning to her book.
‘Hello.’
I start opening cupboards, trying to find a glass to pour myself some water. The first cupboard contains plates and a pasta-maker; the second a crowded assortment of espresso cups.
‘On the right above the sink,’ Cosima says.
‘Thanks.’
I locate the glass and fill it from the tap.
‘We’ve got sparkling if you want,’ says the voice from the sofa.
‘No, that’s fine.’
I stand at the sink as I drink, trying to settle my thoughts.
There is a vase of sweet peas on the small windowsill and a lumpen piece of purple clay that looks like a toddler’s attempt at an ashtray.
It has ‘Tipworth’ painted across the rim in splodgy capital letters.
What must it be like, I wonder, to grow up here and to know it all belongs to you?
‘So why aren’t you in there with all the other, y’know, grown-ups?’
She inflects the final word with effortless scorn. I turn towards her. Cosima has now put aside her copy of The Communist Manifesto.
‘Is Andrew Jarvis still being as cringe as ever?’ she asks.
‘Indubitably.’
She snorts.
‘He and Mum are shagging, I’m pretty sure.’
Interesting, I think. I slide out a chair and position it to face her.
When I sit, I assess her face. She is pretty but not in an obvious way like Serena.
Cosima’s eyebrows are thick, her lips chapped.
There is a crease above her nose and a dimple in her chin.
Taken as a whole, she has a striking quality.
Her colouring is Ben’s and there is something else about her that I recognise; some innate quality.
I’m not sure what it is yet, but it will come to me.
‘Yes, I had the same thought,’ I say.
‘Awkward,’ she replies, but she doesn’t seem particularly bothered by it.
‘So …’ I gesture towards her Marxist tome. ‘You’re in favour of a redistribution of wealth?’
Cosima nods.
‘And the abolition of private property?’
She seems uncertain.
‘Perhaps you haven’t got to that bit yet,’ I say. ‘I can’t imagine you’d want to give all this up.’ I wave at the kitchen, the garden, the sweet peas and the vast unfolding of all the rooms beyond. ‘All these ripe fruits of colonialism, capitalism and inherited wealth …’
‘Ohhhkaaayy,’ she mutters.
‘… just waiting to be plucked from the branch – by you.’
I point at her.
‘You don’t know anything about me,’ she says, nostrils flaring.
‘I know your parents. Where you come from.’
She sits up then. Her dark eyes glitter.
‘I despise it. All of it.’
I lean back in my chair, contemplating her with newfound interest. What a strange thing that this cuckoo should have emerged from Ben and Serena’s feathered nest.
‘Well now,’ I say. ‘There’s something we have in common.’
She laughs. It’s a clean laugh, like the rustle of a beaded curtain.
‘I knew it,’ she says.
‘Knew what?’
‘You’re Martin Gilmour.’
‘Well, yes,’ I say. ‘That much is obvious.’
‘My father’s best friend from school, or at least that’s what you thought you were.
He made you think that. Dad’s good at that, isn’t he?
At making you think you’re the most important person in the world until you do something that disappoints him or he’s got no more use for you, then he ditches you. Kicks you to the kerb.’
She makes a flicking motion with her fingers. Outside, the faraway rumble of a tractor. It’s so bloody quiet in the countryside. No proper noises to hide behind.
‘And I know what happened at Cambridge,’ Cosima says, sitting forward now, her elbows propped on her knees. ‘I know about Vicky Dillane. The car crash. The fact you took the rap for it. You fessed up years later, didn’t you? But they put pressure on the police to make it disappear.’
There is a tinnitus hum in my inner ear. To hear Vicky’s name in someone else’s mouth after so long is like a jab in the ribs: momentarily winding.
‘How on earth …?’
She shrugs.
‘I know my family, Martin. Masters of the cover-up.’
I wince.
‘But there are some things even they can’t hide.’
‘Such as?’ I ask.
‘Such as police records.’
Her voice drops. An edge of electricity to her, a tight, strumming vibration. She is angry. As angry as I might seem if I allowed my feelings to surface. It comes to me then. This is what I recognised in her. Fury.
‘Look, I’ve been waiting to talk to you all day and now we don’t have long,’ she says. ‘I think you might be the only person I know—’
‘You don’t—’
I’m about to say she doesn’t know me at all, but she grabs my wrist.
‘I know enough. From what I’ve read. Or been told. From how my father acts around you. I know you see the truth of them, of what they do to people. And that’s why I need to give you this.’
Releasing my wrist, she takes a scrap of paper from the inside cover of The Communist Manifesto and hands it to me. On it is a handwritten email address, what looks like a password and then something else.
‘What does this say?’
‘Drafts,’ Cosima says. ‘You have to log in to this email, use this password and then look in the drafts folder. Everything you need to see is in there.’
Footsteps in the corridor and then Serena’s voice rising in a swoop, getting closer to the kitchen door. I slip the paper into my jacket pocket.
‘What’s it about?’
‘Fliss,’ she says. And then, quick as a cat, Cosima curls back into herself on the sofa, opening her book. I stand and move to the sink, where I turn on the tap with deliberate calm and start filling my glass.
The kitchen door opens. The expensive scent of jasmine and cedarwood sweeps in, followed by Serena.
‘Martin,’ Serena says. ‘There you are. God, I’m so sorry about Bitsy.’
‘Please, don’t give it a second thought.’
Serena frowns.
‘Are you sure you’re alright?’
I rest my hand on her arm.
‘Just needed a moment,’ I say, with what I hope is a charming smile – the insouciant kind that Ben does so well. Serena’s shoulders relax.
‘Good. Well if you’re sure.’
‘Perfectly.’
We walk back down the corridor, towards the others. I tell myself I’ll stay for one more drink with the insufferable Jarvises until I can make my excuses and retire to bed.
I will return to my room and I’ll finally be able to get out of this suit. I will open my laptop, follow the instructions on the scrap of paper and log in to the email account. I will click on the file in the drafts folder.
Then, I will read all about what happened to Fliss.