Chapter XVIII Serena #3
For a moment, he looked stricken. Then the meanness returned to his eyes.
‘You were always so superior,’ he said. ‘Both of you. You and Ben. Walking around, thinking you’re better than everyone, looking down your noses at us—’
‘I don’t have time for this,’ she said, cutting across him.
On the ground floor, the moustachioed man was now seated at the reception desk, tapping at a computer and pretending not to listen.
‘But you’re not the ones with the power,’ Jarvis was saying, his voice louder now, almost shouting. ‘You think you are, but you’re not. You know who has the power?’
She turned to see Jarvis pointing at his chest with his two thick thumbs.
‘Me.’
She managed to laugh at him. Serena knew the thing these men hated most was being made comical. His leering smile dropped. She looked him straight in the eye and then – she still isn’t sure where this came from – she blew him a mocking little kiss and left.
In the cab on the way back to the train station, she took out her phone and deleted their WhatsApp chat and all the incriminating photos they’d sent each other – apart from one.
She’d keep it as insurance: a nude Jarvis had taken of himself, reflected in a full-length mirror, the flash rebounding off the glass and throwing out a ghoulish light.
She hid the picture in a locked album labelled ‘Scenic views’ and then texted the housekeeper to let her know she’d be skipping dinner.
The IV bag is almost empty. A coolness sinks into Serena’s veins. Her muscles loosen and she imagines her chest opening up like one of those time-lapse videos of flowers blooming – each petal unfurling with shuttering speed until the whole becomes visible.
‘Mrs Fitzmaurice?’
Serena opens her eyes and stares at the nurse. She hates it when people call her ‘Mrs’ and not ‘Lady’. If you’re going to be disrespectful, she thinks, you might as well choose to say ‘Miss’. At least that implies youth.
‘You are done,’ the nurse says, taking out the cannula and blotting the bruised skin with a piece of cotton wool.
Serena opens the clinic’s app on her phone to check her next appointment.
She has an hour free before lunch and decides she will walk out to the jetty on the lake and lie on one of the sun-loungers.
She picks up the branded tote bag the clinic leaves in every room, filled with all the belongings she needs for the day – swimsuit, sunglasses, book, phone and a large pot of chalky magnesium powder she has to drink dissolved in water every few hours – and makes her way outside.
It is sunny and clear, with only the faintest wisps of cumulus across the sky.
The lake is encircled by craggy grey-brown mountains and wooden chalets, built on stilts over the water.
There is only one other person on the sun-loungers – a tanned, grey-haired man in Speedos with a gold medallion around his neck.
He’s sleeping, emitting irregular whistling snores.
She goes right to the end of the jetty, choosing the lounger furthest away from him and lies back on the striped cushions.
She is about to follow the advice of the mindfulness tutor to breathe in to the count of four and admire the landscape, but her phone is vibrating.
She fishes it out of the bag. Ben’s name flashes on the screen.
They haven’t spoken for over a week: he’d been in London and she’d been in Tipworth and he’d tried calling her, but she had sent the calls straight to voicemail.
She hadn’t even told him she was coming here.
She presses ‘decline’ and chucks the phone back in her bag.
She puts on her shades and tries to be calm and aware and grateful and all the things they’ve been telling her to be, which just ends up making her feel more anxious and like she’s failing even at the most basic tasks.
Why is she so hopeless? The prickle of tears again.
She’s tired of being this emotional. Maybe she needs to go back to her gynaecologist and insist on some more testosterone.
It can’t be right to be feeling so completely out of control all the time, surely?
And now the elderly man with the medallion has woken up and is staring at her, so she tries to mop away the tears by sweeping the cuff of her bathrobe underneath her sunglasses.
She bites down on her lip, hoping to replace the destabilising mental pain with the more straightforward physical kind.
Footsteps on the jetty. She worries the older man is coming to check on her and braces herself, tightening the belt on her robe.
The footsteps come to a halt and a shadow falls over her.
She squints and turns, ready to shut down any flirtatious overtures, but it isn’t who she thinks it is.
The medallion-sporting guest is still on his lounger, turned onto his side now, sagging buttocks proudly on display. And the man standing behind her is Ben.
‘Hello,’ he says, one hand shielding his eyes from the sun. He’s in a dark blue suit and grey tie, hair swept back from this temples and looking more prime ministerial by the day. ‘My wife, it seems, is a difficult woman to find.’
She is so surprised to see him she momentarily forgets to be angry.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Well, tempting as it was to book in for a full-body colonic …’
‘They don’t actually do colonics,’ she says.
‘… I came to see you. Can we talk? I think we need to.’
Perhaps it’s the IV drip or the contemplation enforced by the scenery or that she’s expended too much energy already on being furious with him, or perhaps it’s just that she is moved by this gesture to track her down and the implication that, after all, he still needs her – but, whatever the reason, she agrees to hear him out.
Ben sits on the lounger opposite, facing her.
He takes her hands in his. She wants to resist and yet it’s nice to be touching him again.
‘The first thing I want to say is that I’m sorry,’ Ben starts. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about Cosima and those bloody muesli-munchers. I think I thought it would all play itself out and she’d get tired of it or they’d get tired of her and I didn’t want to worry you.’
‘You don’t trust me,’ Serena says.
‘No, that’s not it.’
‘I thought we were a team, Ben. It was always meant to be the two of us against everyone else, wasn’t it? And then I find out you’ve known all along about Cosima—’
‘Not all along, it was—’ he begins to protest. She glares at him. He wisely falls silent.
‘You didn’t tell me and that hurt. It bloody well hurt, Ben.
’ Serena is infuriated to hear her voice cracking.
‘Now she doesn’t want anything to do with us – our own daughter!
And I felt like you didn’t need me anymore.
That you were shutting me out. Just like you did with the leadership bid. With Violet.’
She can hear how silly she sounds, how whiney. She can’t remember a time she’s ever spoken with such vulnerability to him. He fell in love with her because she gave the impression of never needing him, the fortress of her emotional self impossible to scale. Now she is weak.
But, strangely, her truthfulness doesn’t seem to repel him. He leans closer in to her.
‘You are the centre of my life,’ Ben says. ‘I can’t do any of this without you. You’ve always been the strong one.’ He brushes his lips against the inside of her wrist. ‘I’ve been distracted and I’ve been thoughtless,’ he continues.
‘And selfish,’ she adds.
‘Selfish, too,’ he agrees. ‘I’m so sorry I didn’t tell you. I thought I was protecting you. And I’m especially sorry about the Violet nonsense. I hate myself for hurting you. I know we’d agreed no dalliances with people in our circle …’
Serena flinches. It was her chance.
‘In a way, I got my revenge for that,’ she says.
Ben raises his eyebrows.
‘I should tell you. Jarvis and I—’
‘Jarvis?’ His face tightens. ‘Fucking Jarvis?’
‘It just … happened. I wanted some affection and attention and he …’
‘Jesus Christ,’ Ben says, pinching the bridge of his nose. ‘My own wife! That little fucker has some weird obsession with the Fitzmaurice women.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He and Fliss had a thing.’
‘What? When?’ Serena stays very still.
‘He told me it started at that Christmas party before she died. Went on for a few months – nothing serious, apparently, just … well, just Jarvis being Jarvis and Fliss being Fliss, but I think she felt embarrassed because months later she invented this completely insane story about him raping her.’
In the distance, there is a splashing sound, as if a stone has been thrown into the lake. Serena imagines the concentric ripples stretching ever outwards.
‘She even went to the police, gave them some barely comprehensible story,’ Ben continues. ‘I had to pull a few strings there to make sure it never saw the light of day.’
‘Right,’ Serena says, sick lurching in her throat. ‘You don’t think …?’
‘God no. I mean, Jarvis is many things but not a rapist! Fliss was always lying to us to cover up some terrible thing she’d done. She’d relapsed. Wasn’t in her right mind, poor thing.’
Serena blinks. Of course. Yes. Of course Fliss couldn’t have been believed.
Ben was quite right. It made sense, didn’t it?
Jarvis wouldn’t have done that. Never. She tells herself that whatever tiny seeds of doubt might sprout in her subconscious have been planted by her own over-active imagination.
To think anything else would lead her into a darkness she prefers not to examine.
She pictures herself screening the shadows off with a white, white wall. There. All done.
‘I don’t know why,’ Ben says, ‘but I didn’t expect you and Jarvis …’
‘Neither did I. I’m sorry.’
‘I mean, it’s not ideal …’ He gives a short laugh. ‘But I’m in no position to judge, am I?’
That’s the thing about Ben. He isn’t a jealous man.
He believes, with the ineffable ease of someone who has never been truly tested, that everything he is owed will eventually make its way to him.
Wrongs will be righted and scores settled as though natural justice is simply reasserting itself in the presence of a golden king.
He examines a non-existent scuff on the leather of his shoe. ‘Besides, he’s always had a crush on you. How could he not?’
She feels grateful, then, for a husband who has forgiven her and who has never deliberately sought to hurt her. Whatever Ben has done, she also understands the security of her future relies on taking him back.
‘It’s over,’ Serena says. ‘It never really got started, to be honest.’
It was because I needed you, she wants to say. It was because I love you, still, even with all the wounds we’ve inflicted on each other. But the words don’t come.
The sun passes behind a cloud and their faces fall into shadow.
With every second that Ben stays silent, Serena can feel the balance between them reasserting itself.
It makes her both happy and sad. A return to normality.
It’s what she wanted. It’s also what will trap her. And in the end, it’s all she has.
‘OK,’ he says finally. ‘I understand. I’m in a tricky position with Jarvis because you know he’s bankrolling a lot of the campaign and—’
‘I get that,’ Serena says. ‘It’s not an issue for me if he’s still in your life. We’re all grown-ups here, after all.’
She knows how to play this part. It’s what her mother trained her to do.
She will stay married. Ben will stay faithless.
She will accept it because the alternative would be worse.
Serena wishes she knew how to be alone but she doesn’t.
Any upheaval would have to be founded on qualities she doesn’t possess – on courage and self-belief.
She thinks of Cosima, who embodies them both.
‘You’re amazing,’ Ben says.
She has missed making him love her.
‘Thank you. I haven’t felt it much lately.’
‘And you look incredible, by the way. Austrian broth clearly suits you.’
It’s true she has lost weight. It isn’t just the clinic. She’s been ordering some extremely effective weight-loss injections online. All she had to do was upload a picture. A search for ‘overweight woman 40s’ on Google Images had provided the necessary.
‘Can we put the last few months behind us?’ Ben says, a satisfying note of pleading in his words.
She knows he needs her to put on a united front so that his messy personal life doesn’t scupper his chances to become PM.
She knows, too, this gives her a transient power and that she must press her advantage now before it dissipates.
‘We can,’ she says. ‘But I’m not moving to Downing Street. It’s a hovel.’
He laughs.
‘OK. Would you consent to being there one or two nights a week?’
She shrugs. That wouldn’t be too bad. It would make it easier to see her shaman. The Pilates studios are better in London.
‘If we redecorate.’
‘Deal.’
‘And Cosima …?’
‘She’ll be fine,’ Ben says confidently. ‘I’ve had a talk with her. She’s agreed to drop the Oblivion Oil bullshit if she can leave her school and go to the sixth-form college in Tipworth for her final year, which if you think about it …’
Serena finishes his sentence.
‘… works out very well for you,’ she says.
He smiles.
‘Quite. A daughter at state school. Plays well with the voters and saves us a tonne of money, so win-win. We just need to keep the Oblivion Oil stuff out of the papers, which I think I’ve managed to do.
I got the lawyers on it, threatening an injunction – think of the children, they never asked for a public life, all that. So far, the editors have played ball.’
‘Is she alright? Cosima? I worry we’ve let her down.’
Ben takes her hand in his.
‘She’ll be fine. It’s standard teenage rebellion. She’s a good girl, really.’
Serena doesn’t tell him she went to see Cosima in Cambridge. Some protective instinct prevents her from doing so. That was between her and Cosima, no one else. In time, if they make enough amends, then maybe their daughter will come back to them.
‘I hope so,’ Serena says. ‘I hope you’re right.’ She reaches out and strokes the side of his face.
That’s how it’s all agreed between them.
They know each other so well, you see. They know each other’s flaws and each other’s potency; they know the depths of their shared ambition and their joint belief in their own exceptionalism.
They understand each other’s wickedness in a way no one else can, and what is this if not a kind of love?
Whatever damage they wreak on each other, it will always be part of the game they play.
And if the pain never fully heals, doesn’t its familiarity feel a lot like love?