Chapter 33
THIRTY-THREE
It was dark by the time I left Kate’s flat. The warm sun – a promise of spring that had filled me with hope that I could take back control of everything that had unravelled since Zara had walked back into our lives – had long set, and the chill of evening seemed to sap my confidence.
Despite the cold and the wind that whipped along the river, tangling my hair and cutting through my thin denim jacket, I walked across Tower Bridge over the river instead of heading to the nearest Tube station. I barely registered where I was going; my feet moved on autopilot, my thoughts scattered. I felt as if I was close to a resolution, the solutions to the problems that had almost shattered my marriage and placed my closest friendships in jeopardy almost within my grasp.
Rowan and I could tell the others about Zara’s final lie, reveal her for the person she was, definitively not to be trusted. The fog of mistrust could be cleared. I could tell Patch what she’d done and maybe one day we’d laugh about it. I could rebuild my marriage, put my selfish personal ambitions on the back burner for now, embrace the life that until Andy’s death and Zara’s reappearance had felt safe if not satisfying.
I could make it all work.
The prospect sustained me all the way home, through kissing my children’s sleeping faces, holding my breath so as not to wake them, through telling Patch that I wasn’t hungry and microwaving a ready meal for him as if he wasn’t capable of doing it himself, through cleaning my teeth and putting on my pyjamas and getting into bed.
But as soon as I switched off the light, it was as if a light inside my head came on.
I couldn’t turn back the clock. I needed to face up to the insecurities that had made me doubt my friends and made all of us believe Zara’s lies. I needed to face up to my own role in the break-up of her and Patch’s relationship. I needed to start afresh.
I needed to see Zara.
I spent the night sleeping fitfully, itching to contact her, to arrange to meet up, to say my piece. But five thirty in the morning – when I officially gave up on sleep – was too early to contact anyone, even Zara. Perhaps especially Zara, who had always been a night owl.
I lay in the darkness, my eyes open and my mind whirring, until Patch’s alarm went off and I heard Toby call me from his bed.
Then, of course, the carnage of the morning began, and it was almost ten before I was able to sit down with my phone, drinking coffee on the sofa in the slanting morning sun, and compose my message.
Zara replied almost immediately, and we arranged to meet in town, not for lunch or drinks, but in Trafalgar Square, like we were spies organising a dead drop or something.
Unusually – although perhaps inevitably – I was early. I’d decided not to bother dressing up or putting on make-up – she knew what I looked like, after all, and stunning her with my highlighted, contoured beauty wouldn’t change the fact that she’d always been more beautiful than I could dream of being.
Sitting in the sunshine on the steps of the National Gallery, my jacket draped over my shoulders, looking up at Nelson’s Column soaring into the sky, down at the eagerly pecking pigeons and around at the crowds of tourists, I felt oddly at peace. Whatever happened today would probably not change anything, but might at least clear my conscience.
Zara arrived exactly on time. Like me, she wasn’t wearing make-up – the first time I’d ever seen her without it. Her skin was alabaster flawless, but her eyes looked smaller, her jawline rounder. In her gym leggings and jumper, she looked very young and somehow defenceless.
She sat down next to me and wrapped her arms around her knees.
‘Hey, Naomi.’
‘Hey. Thanks for coming.’
‘It’s okay. I had nothing on. I’m going back to Paris this afternoon – I only came back to check out of my Airbnb.’
‘Then I’m glad I caught you. This won’t take long. I – basically, I just wanted to say sorry.’
I angled my body sideways so I could see her face. We were close enough that, over the scent of roasting nuts from a street vendor’s cart and a cloud of sweet, fruity vapour from a passerby’s e-cigarette, I could smell her familiar perfume.
‘You’re sorry?’ Her eyes widened in surprise.
‘I… Yeah.’ I looked down, my fingers twiddling the strap of my handbag, then forced myself to meet her gaze again. ‘I did a shit thing, back then with Patch. You trusted me and I betrayed your trust. I was in love and I thought that made it okay, but it didn’t.’
Zara laughed. The sun emerged from behind a cloud, illuminating her face and the brilliant green of her eyes. She squinted against it, the sides of her nose wrinkling, and pushed her sunglasses down from her head.
‘I didn’t think you’d go through with it, you know,’ she said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘With Patch. Come on. I wasn’t stupid – I could see how you wanted it to go. And he fancied you too. What a man, honestly. Lovely to look at but as subtle as a brick.’
‘Is that why you told me you’d been unfaithful to him?’ I asked. It felt strange articulating the secret I’d kept to myself all these years.
‘I had to, didn’t I? You’d never have got on with it and shagged him if I hadn’t. There was a risk you’d tell him, of course, but I didn’t think you would.’
My sleep-deprived brain reeled. I felt like I was in one of those funfair halls of mirrors, all the reflections of myself and the people I thought I knew suddenly distorted and unfamiliar.
‘Hang on.’ I looked up at her again, but saw only my own face, reflected in the black lenses of her shades. ‘You meant for me and Patch to get together? I don’t understand.’
‘It’s simple.’ She turned to me, her blank gaze direct. ‘You wanted something that was mine. I didn’t want it much myself, but that wasn’t the point. And I wanted something you had. So I figured we’d do a trade.’
‘Zara, I don’t get it. What are you talking about?’
‘You had them – Kate, Rowan and Abbie. You were right there in the inner circle and I wasn’t.’
‘But you weren’t even here. You were in Paris.’
‘Doesn’t matter. I could have been camping out in their front room and it would have made no difference. You were their friend and I was just someone who was around because she was dating their mate.’
‘But we all were. The Girlfriends’ Club – the clue’s in the name. That’s how it started. And anyway, you said?—’
But she interrupted me before I could continue. ‘Sure. For about five seconds – which was approximately how long it took for Kate to dump Ryan and stop being a girlfriend, if you remember. You and Whatshisname didn’t last much longer. Then Rowan and Paul split up. And Andy was never anyone’s girlfriend.’
I stared at her, my face no doubt as blank as her black-covered eyes. ‘I don’t understand. I thought this was about Patch, but you’re talking about our friends.’
She sighed, like she was explaining something very simple to someone very hard of thinking. ‘It was about him, like I said. I thought if he cheated on me with you, they’d want you out of the group and me in, because they’d feel sorry for me.’
‘But that’s mad.’
‘Possibly. It made sense to me at the time.’ She shrugged. ‘Anyway, it didn’t work, did it?’
In a small voice, I said, ‘That’s because no one knew. They thought you’d already split up. I even thought that.’
‘Did you, now?’
‘I… Okay, we’d flirted. We even kissed. But that was literally all. That’s why I wanted to see you today – to say I was sorry for that. By the time – you know, before anything more than that happened – you weren’t together any more. At least that’s what I thought. I only found out recently that that wasn’t true.’
The sky had clouded over once more and the breeze was picking up. On the hard, cold stone of the step, I could feel my buttocks going numb. I shifted, pulling my jacket closer around my shoulders. Zara pushed her shades up again.
‘How did you find out?’ she asked.
‘He told me. But only because I asked.’
‘He’s quite the player, isn’t he, your husband?’
‘He says he made a mistake. He says he didn’t want to hurt you.’
‘Funny, that. That’s what he told me, the morning after Abbie’s wedding.’
‘That he didn’t want to hurt you?’ Even as I asked the question, I knew what the answer would be.
Zara laughed, a small, humourless sound. ‘That he didn’t want to hurt you.’
My mouth suddenly felt dry and my stomach tight, so it was hard for me to get air into my lungs. I remembered that next morning – waking up in Rowan’s room, hungover and confused. Borrowing some clothes from her because I couldn’t do what would look like the walk of shame along the hotel corridor in my bridesmaid’s dress. Hurrying back to my own room and finding Patch there in the shower, and wondering in confusion why housekeeping had already been in and made the bed, and him explaining that he’d woken early and already been down for breakfast.
And me not wanting to disbelieve him, not wanting to think for even a single second that there was any reason to doubt him, even though the last I’d heard the previous night he’d been outside with Zara, calming her down while she smoked in the garden.
Adrenaline coursed through me, making my skin prickle. ‘What are you saying?’
‘Do I really need to spell it out? We slept together that night. He never could resist me. I was pissed, but that’s not really why I did it. I can show you the texts he sent me, if you like. He did feel terrible about it, to be fair. Although not terrible enough not to come and see me in Paris a few weeks later.’
‘I don’t believe you.’ I could barely get the words out.
My mind was scrambling like a spider when you catch it in a glass to put it outside, struggling to recall those few weeks, when Patch had been up in Aberdeen with work, which had been normal then. But then there’d been a weekend when he was supposed to be home, but hadn’t because there was some problem that had kept him there.
It had all seemed plausible at the time – it hadn’t even crossed my mind that there was anything to worry about. Just a blip, an inconvenience. Just missing him. Not this.
‘If you don’t believe me, you should take a look on that camera,’ she said. ‘I can’t believe you haven’t already. There are photos of us together on there. Time stamped and everything. But it didn’t last; he said he wouldn’t do it any more, because he wanted to be with you. And it was pretty clear by then that what I’d thought would happen with you and the other girls wasn’t going to happen, so…’
She shrugged, as if dismissing a minor inconvenience – her favourite shade of lipstick being discontinued, say, or not being able to get a table at a restaurant she wanted to try.
‘So you gave up?’
‘I was busy. I had other things going on in my life. It just wasn’t that important.’
‘And then Andy died.’
‘And then Andy died,’ she agreed. ‘You know, I did care about him. He and I were quite similar in lots of ways. Both fucked up.’
I wanted to scream, Andy was nothing like you! Andy was kind, deep down. He cared about his friends.
But I could see where she was coming from. Whatever it was in her that was fragile – so damaged it was almost broken – must have found an echo in Andy, wrestling with different demons.
‘So you decided to come back for the funeral and try and wreak havoc with our friendship all over again?’
‘It wasn’t a decision, really. It just sort of happened.’
She made it sound so casual, as if what she’d almost succeeded in doing wasn’t in the least important.
‘And pretending you had cancer? Did that sort of happen, too?’
‘Oh.’ Now, surprisingly, Zara blushed. I couldn’t see much of her skin between the high neck of her jumper and the stark black rims of her shades, but the ivory pallor was briefly suffused with mottled pink. ‘You weren’t supposed to find out about that. Never mind come dashing out to Paris to check up on me. Honestly, that was above and beyond.’
‘What the hell did you think would happen, though? You can’t just lie about shit like that.’
‘Well, no one wants to admit they’ve got a nasty case of thrombosed piles, do they? I had to tell Gabi, because I needed a place to stay, but I didn’t want it all over my social media, obviously. So I came up with something that sounded a bit more – émouvant . And you know what it’s like when you start telling a story. Sometimes you get carried away.’
I was silenced – shocked by the lightheartedness with which Zara dismissed her lies. And then I realised it was just more of the same – more of the elaborate stories she’d told us all, different ones for different people, tailored according to what would have the greatest appeal to each of us.
My appalled disbelief must have shown on my face, because Zara said, ‘Come on, Naomi. It wasn’t that big of a deal. No one got hurt.’
‘It is a big deal, though. Can’t you see that? Lying to people who care about you is a massive deal.’
‘And you’ve never done that? Really? Not even the teeniest snow-white lie?’
I felt my own face colour now. Of course I had. Telling Patch I was too tired for sex when the truth was I just didn’t want it. Telling the children I’d forgotten to bring their Easter chocolate home from Bridget’s when actually I’d left it there deliberately so they could have a bit every time they visited and hopefully rot their teeth gradually instead of all at once.
Telling myself I could make my marriage work, even though I was pretty certain that I couldn’t.
‘It’s different,’ I protested.
‘Maybe.’ She shrugged again. ‘I just don’t see it that way.’
‘Zara.’ I stood up. ‘I guess there are a lot of things you and I don’t see the same way. I hope maybe one day you’ll realise that some things we do aren’t okay, and we’ve got to deal with the consequences.’
‘God, don’t lecture me, Naomi! It’s not like you’re perfect.’
‘Oh, no,’ I said. ‘I’m as far from perfect as it gets. I’ve done plenty of things I’m not proud of. But I’ve got to own them, and try to make amends. That’s why I wanted to apologise to you, and I meant it. I’m sorry, Zara.’
I took one last look at her, hunched and small on the stairs like a doll, or a figure made by a child out of pipe cleaners. I didn’t say goodbye – I just walked slowly away. She’d done her best to hurt me, and she’d succeeded. She couldn’t hurt me any more – not if I didn’t let her.