The Last Guest

by Tess Little

  No music, no radio. We did not speak.

  It was dark now; the roads were good, but Kei would make sharp turns and sudden stops, like she was driving through rush hour with a flight to catch. Jogged her knee up and down at each red light, kept clearing her throat, until I was twitchy with nerves as well—her anxiety was infectious.

  Kei didn’t need any more distractions; I waited until we had finally cleared the city, cruising north on the highway, before speaking.

  “How are you?” I asked.

  Kei shook her head.

  “Why didn’t you come to see me sooner?”

  She kept her eyes on the road, ignored my second question, said, “I’m not good, dude, I’m not good. I didn’t know if I could. There’s, uh—there’s something I need to tell you.”

  “About Richard?” I asked, tentative.

  “Yeah,” she said. “About Richard.”

  * * *

  —

  Richard was lying on the bed in a fluffy white bathrobe.

  “I don’t understand why you went behind my back like that,” he said.

  I was on the couch. The curtain was illuminated as a car drove down the street below.

  “It was supposed to be a surprise,” I said. “I wasn’t lying, it—”

  “But you were lying, weren’t you? This whole time. You know, your honesty was one of the things that made me fall in love with you.”

  Richard watched me as he said this, waiting for the flinch of pain to cross my face. I tried to keep my expression neutral, but my eyes were stinging and I felt sick. I could not meet his eye.

  “You knew about my childhood,” he said. “You knew how painful those memories are. I don’t understand why you would do this.”

  “Because you always talk about your summers at Sedgwick. Like those were your happiest days.”

  “Happiest days,” he spat. “It’s all relative, Ellie. I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”

  I closed my eyes.

  “Sedgwick?” he said. “Fucking Sedgwick?”

  I had booked us train tickets to Norfolk, for the penultimate day of our honeymoon. Richard had planned our entire trip around Europe, paid for everything, and I could never afford to treat him as he had me. I poured my heart into this small surprise instead. My little wedding gift.

  The estate had new owners now, the Mortons, a middle-aged couple; I’d liaised with them extensively from hotel lobbies as Richard and I traveled. The gardens were closed to the public on Saturdays, but they had been so generous, agreeing to let us roam freely. They knew what it would mean to Richard and to me. The staff at Claridge’s—where we’d been staying that week—were in on the secret too. They prepared a little picnic hamper for me to collect in the morning, had researched our route, even weather reports.

  “Scorcher,” confirmed the concierge, when I called him from our room the night before, as Richard showered. “I’d take a hat if I were you, miss.”

  And so that’s what I was wearing that morning: a large straw hat; a white cotton sundress. The concierge presented me with the hamper, from the chefs, with a wink.

  At Liverpool Street, I ordered Richard to ignore the announcement boards, although I hadn’t realized the routes only went eastward; our surprise destination was not so well concealed.

  “To the Norfolk seaside?” he asked. “Or am I not to guess? God, I could murder some fish and chips. Doused in vinegar. Is it the seaside, Ellie? Is it?”

  I kept my mouth firmly shut. Pleased with myself, gleeful as we boarded the train and he still hadn’t guessed—not even as we sliced out of London, through towns, through countryside, past marshland and tractors. And then we changed at Norwich to a local bus service, and he realized.

  At the time I had thought Richard might be travel sick, but looking back, I could tell: He withdrew because he’d figured it out. He stopped talking and laughing, let go of my hand. He turned away from the window—eyes fixed on the back of the seat in front. By the time we reached our stop, he was pale and paralyzed.

  “This is us,” I said tentatively. He did not move. “Our stop, Richard.”

  The couple across the aisle were staring. The bus driver was about to pull away again.

  “Wait. Please,” I called out. Then turned back to my husband. “Richard,” I said. “Our stop.”

  He looked at me with hate in his eyes. And I knew somehow I had made an awful mistake, even if I wasn’t certain then what that mistake had been.

  Sedgwick was beautiful. Surrounded by a thicket, the house was hidden until the very last moment, and then there it was: red-brick and cobbled; ivy and wisteria; the most chimneys I’d ever seen on one building. Swans on the river—or was it a moat? The water was calm, layered with lilies; the grass was vibrant with sun. We trudged, unspeaking.

  “Elspeth, hello! And Richard too, lovely to meet you. Lovely.” I couldn’t tell where the voice was coming from. “How was the surprise? One second, let me—there.”

  Mrs. Morton emerged from the bushes beside us.

  “Gooseberries,” she said, untangling a twig from her hair. It took a while for me to understand what she had said. Ghuz-bleece. “I’m always picking gooseberries at this time of year. Couldn’t stop them growing even if we wanted to. Endless jams, endless. I don’t suppose you’re fans?”

  She removed her gardening gloves to shake our hands.

  “But, then, you already know that, don’t you?” she asked Richard. “You must have fattened up on gooseberries every year.” And when he didn’t respond: “Well, I can only imagine how wonderful summers here must have been for you as a boy.”

  “Yes,” he half-answered.

  Mrs. Morton looked from Richard to me and back again. “Can I offer you tea? A biscuit, perhaps?”

  “No,” said Richard. “Thank you.”

  I tried to make an excuse: “It’s a kind offer, but we’re tired from the journey, actually, and we’ve brought”—I held it up—“this picnic. Would you mind if we stayed outside?”

  “Of course,” she said. “I’ll leave you to it. You’ll want to sit on the lawn, won’t you? Well, I’m going that way too.”

  As we crossed a little bridge toward the house, Mrs. Morton chitchatted on. I winced with each question, with Richard’s short answers.

  “How are Penelope and James?” she said. “Such a shame they couldn’t keep up the estate with James’s condition. Have to say I don’t know them very well, but they seemed such lovely people when we met them during the sale. How are they? How is James? They’re in London full-time now?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” said Richard. He was staring at his feet.

  “Richard and I live in California,” I explained. And then didn’t quite lie but obscured the truth: “He doesn’t get to see his parents much.”

  “Ah yes, yes. I do remember, you said. And you’ve been traveling around Europe, is that right?”

  When she finally left us, I felt exhausted, on the verge of tears.

  I had envisioned Richard and me strolling through the grounds. We would lie in the grass and I would feed him strawberries as he recounted his boyhood adventures. I thought there might have been a river and we might have removed our clothes, cooled our bodies in the dark-green depths. Abandoned our carefulness in the tempered English wild.

  Instead, our picnic had a strange formality. I unpacked the hamper. Laid out the cloth, the plates, the cutlery—deliberately, as though pouring myself into each small task would change anything.

  I didn’t speak. I didn’t know how to begin. If I didn’t begin, I couldn’t say the wrong thing.

  Richard sat picking grass.

  The kitchen, the concierge, had packed a perfect picnic, had even printed a menu card in miniature: cheeses tied in wax paper, a small seeded loaf, two glass bottles of apple juice, and a Crom
er crab and asparagus salad dressed in mustard vinaigrette; to finish, two cream buns and strawberries.

  Richard ate none of it. I wasn’t hungry either, but I felt I couldn’t leave everything untouched. I nibbled the asparagus. Felt immediately sick.

  We left only half an hour or so after we’d arrived. Richard stood on the bridge while I went back to the house, knocked on the door to give Mrs. Morton our thanks and goodbyes.

  “Are you sure?” she said. “You came all that way…”

  I made an excuse: I was feeling under the weather. I felt ugly as I said it, certain she would see through me. But she didn’t, and that was worse. She told me to hang on, dashed back inside the house. Returned with a bottle of homemade lemonade that she pressed into my arms.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  Those were the last words I spoke until we reached London, till we were back in our hotel room. Richard had undressed, showered, returned to the bedroom in silence. I felt like it was possible: that maybe both of us would wait for the other to talk, and we’d be waiting forever, and maybe I would die before I knew exactly what I’d done wrong.

  Then Richard voiced his first accusation, cold: I don’t understand why you went behind my back like that.

  It was supposed to be a surprise, I said.

  * * *

  —

  Kei gripped the wheel, stared at the road, as though searching for a way to begin.

  “I know you and Richard had disagreements,” I ventured. “I overheard you at the party, talking with Charlie.”

  “Disagreements.” She snorted. “That’s what the prosecution had me say on the witness stand. But no—that’s not the word for what he did to me.”

  I pulled my cardigan tight around myself.

  “Some of it came out in court,” she said. “But not all. I answered their questions, told the truth. The defense wanted to show that our professional relationship was volatile. That I hated Richard so much I could…So the prosecutors, they were downplaying it. Of course I went along with them. I didn’t want anyone to think I was— I didn’t. I didn’t murder him.”

  I let out my breath as quietly as I could. Although I hadn’t wanted to acknowledge the thought, it had been there as Kei screeched us out of the city.

  “And it worked.” She shook her head. “Did you see the press? Twitter? Let’s not jump to conclusions. We don’t know the whole story. People who I’d worked with before, saying I was exaggerating, when I was doing the exact opposite. Richard was meticulous, but that’s just the industry. He was a nice guy.”

  “I’ve been trying not to go online lately,” I said carefully. “But I can imagine.”

  (A wonderful, dependable father.)

  (The best husband I could have asked for.)

  “Some of that’s people covering their asses,” Kei explained. “Like, they knew Richard was more than ‘meticulous.’ But others waded in without knowing. And I get it, I do. You wouldn’t want to think someone is capable of— I mean, when the stuff about Honey came out, I didn’t want to believe it. I knew how evil Richard could be and I still didn’t want to believe it. But even then, I would never— Why do people defend monsters like him?”

  I could answer that question, but I did not.

  I held my breath. Looked out the window—the clusters of houses growing farther apart until they were gone altogether.

  “The thing is, the lawyers didn’t know everything,” Kei continued after a while. “And I wasn’t going to bring it up—I didn’t want to make myself look guilty. Now I feel sick. Because the story that came out in court isn’t the whole truth. That’s not who Richard was. And the more news reports I’ve read about Richard and the trial, the more people defending him online, the more my anger has been building up. And now…

  “I haven’t told Sabine. I haven’t even answered her calls the past few days. She—I mean, she knows about this. She kind of always suspected; she saw some stuff on set. You know, Richard didn’t treat her and the rest of the cast too well either. But then the whole story came out when we were driving to Richard’s party—I told her everything, and she didn’t understand why I was making us go to the party. That’s why she was being so weird that night. She was like, If you’re making me celebrate this monster, then fucking watch me—aren’t I having such a great time…”

  This made sense. I had never quite been able to understand Sabine’s behavior that night.

  Kei caught me frowning. “Yeah, I lied at the memorial, when you mentioned her dancing with Richard on his birthday. They never usually flirted. She did it to piss me off because we had another argument and—yeah, I was pissed off. But we were fine by the end of the night.”

  Kei had been babbling fast. Stopped abruptly when she realized she’d talked herself off track. Then she seemed to remember what she’d wanted to say. “Sabine knows about this,” she continued, “but what she doesn’t know is that I’m ready to come forward. I don’t know what she’d say about that…but I had to make the decision by myself. I want to know I’m doing it for the right reasons and that it’s the right thing to do for me. I’m sorry, Elspeth, I know I’m not making any fucking sense.”

  I waited for Kei to gather her thoughts.

  “And I’ve decided,” she said. “I think I’ve got to come forward. Who knows—who knows how many people—”

  “Kei,” I said calmly, although I could hear the beat in my chest. “I think you need to start from the beginning.”

  * * *

  —

  I tried to explain: “I wanted to re-create—I wanted to get to know—”

  “I can’t do this.” Richard reached for the phone. “I’m calling room service. I need a drink.”

  “Please.” It came out shrill. I lowered my voice. “Please don’t, Richard. Don’t…”

  He paused for a moment, fingers hovering over the buttons. Then slammed the handset. Lay back and stared at the ceiling.

  “I thought you would enjoy the trip,” I said, hoarse, after a silence. “I thought—”

  “You thought, you thought—this is exactly my point, Elspeth. You don’t think about how your decisions affect me.”

  I bit my tongue.

  Richard shut his eyes, as though pained. “Yes, you think you did this for me, but if you’d thought about it properly, you’d have realized that I’d never, never want this. A reminder of my fucking childhood?”

  “You always talk about the gardens,” I said. “The medieval fishing ponds and the lily pads and how you’d spend hours—”

  “—by myself. Yes, because the gardens were my refuge, Elspeth. I spent hours hiding in the trees when Father was in one of his moods. I picked gooseberries straight from the bush when I was starving because my mother had drunk too much sherry to remember lunch. I invented worlds and games and I explored the grounds because I was lonely.

  “Do you remember when I told you about the time I fell asleep in the potato patch and a gardener found me? He found me in the morning—no one had noticed I wasn’t sleeping in my bed. Remember when I told you about the time my cousins came to stay with us and we swam in the moat? And I told you I insisted on remaining fully dressed in a jumper and trousers in the height of summer? It was because I couldn’t show them the scars on my back from my father’s…I was too ashamed. Until I went to boarding school, Elspeth, Sedgwick was my refuge. There were places to hide. But you should have known that. You knew about my childhood; you should have thought about what I was hiding from.”

  I should have known. He was right. I was heartless.

  He went on: “You always do this. You daydream some romantic scenario. And I’m supposed to play the grateful role, aren’t I? Well, I won’t do it, Elspeth, I can’t.”

  It was so difficult not to cry. I pressed my eyeballs hard.

  “I just don’t get it.” Richard sighed. “I
bring you to this fabulous hotel and I spend my money on exquisite meals and we plan, together, to spend a few days enjoying London—one of the best cities in the world, by the way—but now I find out that this whole time you’ve wanted to go somewhere else. It’s so…it’s so ungrateful.”

  He sat up on the edge of the bed. “And it’s typical of you.” He raised his voice. “Always so fucking nonchalant. I take you to the most wonderful places in the world and you shrug your shoulders like I’m showing you a motel. A bloody 7-Eleven. Reminds me of New York, you say on the streets of Paris. Just like South Street Seaport. Fucking hell.” He flung down a pillow. Thumped it with a fist. “Would it kill you to be a little more enthusiastic? I give you everything. I give you everything.”

  But I had been amazed by it all. I could not believe my surroundings—afternoon tea in Tiffany-blue china; the antique elevator. Chandeliers and a shining chessboard floor; the wide and winding staircase. And the weeks before: the food, museums; cobbled streets and cathedrals.

  How was I supposed to show my wonder? He had plucked me from closing shifts at Food 4 Less and thrown me into a fantasy. I didn’t want to seem immature, sheltered, uncouth—I thought I was supposed to act like I belonged there. Like I had always belonged there.

  I was crying. I was pathetic.

  Richard picked up the receiver again.

  “No,” I tried to say. A moan between sobs. “No, Richard, don’t.”

  His eyes were resolute.

  “I’m not listening to you crying like a child all night,” he muttered, lifting the phone to his ear. “You’re giving me a fucking headache.”

  “Richard, don’t throw it away. Years of sobriety, your years of hard work—”

  “Hello.” He smiled with his teeth, like the concierge was in the room. But his eyes were unchanged: flinty and cold.

  “Richard.” I pushed myself up from the floor, walked toward him. I could not stop crying. “Richard.”

  “I’d like to order room service, please. Yes, thank you. I’ll take—”