“Everything you’ve told me about Robert, all of his actions, suggest his feelings for you were powerful, that you got under his skin and into his head.” Mrs. Lewen has an annoying ability to guess at my fantasies. “Maybe he never expected that. Whatever Robert did to you—”
“Whatever he did to me is irrelevant, given the fact that he saved my life and hurt himself forever by doing it. The other stuff—the big lie about his wife—is actually pretty small by comparison.”
Mrs. Lewen looks pleased with me, despite my impatience with her. “You saved him, too,” she says quietly.
“He was only in danger because of me. That hardly counts as saving him.”
“He may be shy of you, after what happened. Wanting to give you space to recover, not frighten you. He’s your baby’s father, Clarissa. You should find him and talk to him.”
“Don’t you think the news might come as a tiny little bit of a shock? Besides, I don’t want him to be with me just because of the baby. Not to mention the fact that I don’t want to try to take him from his wife—I feel bad enough about her. And I can’t chase him. I can’t . . . foist myself on someone. That’s what that man did to me.”
Eleanor told me that there was a shrine in that man’s house, and too many photographs to count. He knew my life better than I did.
“But Robert’s the great mystery to you,” Mrs. Lewen says. “You need to solve it to move on. You need to understand what Robert did, and why, and what he’s thinking now.”
“You’re wrong,” I say. “I think I do understand him. I think you’ve just helped me to. Robert’s not my great mystery.”
Mrs. Lewen looks surprised. “Then what is?”
“Laura.”
I picture Mrs. Betterton sitting beside my mother, the two of them weeping in each other’s arms while Mr. Betterton and my father stand there looking solemn and sad and awkward.
“I thought her parents might hate me,” I say. “That they might never forgive me. For being the one who survived. For not being Laura.”
Mrs. Lewen tells me to take a few sips of tea before continuing, and I obey her.
“You don’t have any regret that he’s dead, do you?” Mrs. Lewen asks.
The Bettertons told us that the police say it wasn’t Laura on the magazine cover. This fills me with relief, but it’s a very muted kind of relief because I can’t stop feeling haunted by the question of who the woman was. The Bettertons also told us that the forensic people found pornographic photos of Laura in his house, hidden beneath floorboards. Is that where he’d have put the last photos he took of me, too?
He might have got away with murdering me by means of reasonable doubt, by suggesting it could have been you. You were all over my bed, too. He might have said he and I had consensual sex and then he left me alive and happy, only for you to turn up after he was gone and torture and kill me. Court 12 taught me too well.
The police only just discovered he spent a summer in California seven years ago. Laura’s last summer. The trail is cold now, but perhaps not entirely gone. The American police are opening an investigation into her disappearance, at last. They are liaising with the British police, who are combing carefully through all evidence.
Do I regret that he’s dead?
I can’t think of a dumber question than that one. There’s no way I can answer truthfully. If I do, Mrs. Lewen will probably tell the police that I’m an unrepentant murdering psychopath; I really don’t want that in the file they send to the Crown Prosecution Service. And I really don’t want her advising social services to take my baby away.
But I do cut Mrs. Lewen a very large piece of the truth and hand it to her on a plate. “I’m haunted by the idea that I ruined the Bettertons’ only chance of finding out what happened to Laura. He might have told them. Now he never can.”
I don’t want to go back to the university, though I haven’t figured out exactly what I’ll do once all of the broken pieces of me have been glued together and the cracks don’t show so much. If there’s a way of helping to search for Laura, then that’s what I want it to be. Maybe through writing, or publicity, or starting some kind of awareness-raising foundation in her name, with her parents.
“That seems a natural feeling to have, Clarissa,” Mrs. Lewen says. “That seems very human.”
Perhaps she won’t say I’m a psychopath after all.
“I’m not sure though that you’re being entirely honest with yourself when you say that Robert isn’t your great mystery.”
She’ll just say I’m self-deluded. Though I can’t help but admit to myself that Mrs. Lewen is wise in some ways.
Friday, July 24
Newly healed tissue burns easily. Another of the plastic surgeon’s warnings. Because of it, I am wearing a huge floppy straw hat to keep the sun off my face as I walk with my parents along the seafront. My empire-line dress looks like summer. Only my mother can make a dress that does the contradictory things of stretching and clinging and falling like water all at once. The pale-blue jersey swishes softly. A breeze shapes the light fabric around my small bump. We hurry past the stink of the fast-food kiosks and onto the wooden planks of the pier.
My eyes skim over the amusement arcade building. Just inside the entrance, in the shadows, a tall man stands. He seems to be watching me. I can’t see his face, but I imagine something of you in his stance and begin to walk toward him in a kind of trance. He turns and steps inside, quickly, moving with a limp. I start to run, barely noticing when my hat flies off, hardly hearing my parents calling me back. I forget that I am pregnant, forget that I have lost my stamina after so many months of enforced rest, forget everything but my mad conviction that this man is you.
I halt abruptly near a glass tank full of toy aliens with a large claw hovering over them. I turn in a circle, then another one, then another still, thinking if I can take in the full 360 degrees of the room I will spot you. The pings and pongs of the inane machines are ringing in my ears as I scan the crowds. Somebody screams as they crash their fake car. The fairground organ is deafening, as if I am at a haunted carnival. Colored bulbs flash brightly on the games. Strobe lights make the air pulse.
My heart is pounding, my head is spinning, and I’m hiccuping. My chest is blotchy and damp. All of this could be from the sudden exertion. Or it could be because of the anti-nausea medication. Maybe it’s from both of these things together.
I will never find that man. It was crazy to think he was you. This nightmare arcade is impossibly huge, and there are too many ways out that he could have slipped through. Even if I were to search the entire pier, it would be all too easy to hide and disappear on either of its long sides, in any of its countless rides and buildings.
My parents are at my side, puzzled and worried, tugging at me gently, leading me off the pier, telling me my hat blew into the sea. We step carefully through the brick-paved lanes, my father guiding us through the twisting alleyways, keeping us in the shade. We wander beneath the domes and pinnacles and minarets and chimney stacks of the old palace. I trail my fingers through the broom’s yellow petals.
My parents arrange me near a laburnum in a quiet part of the gardens. Rowena and Annie are coming for lunch on Sunday, and Annie’s bringing Miss Norton down, so my mother wants to buy a few special things. She’s dragging my father along to help her carry them.
I’m glad to be on my own for a while, watching the ladybirds and butterflies. I’m deeply drowsy, probably the fault of the anti-nausea drug again, so I lie down on the grass. People do this sort of thing in this city by the sea. When I remember that I’m not supposed to be on my back, I roll onto my right side, propped on my bent elbow, my hand cupping my head to support it. The pigeons are swarming above the lilacs. They make me think of the hordes of winged monkeys in The Wizard of Oz. Mrs. Lewen is always telling me that the monkeys are supposed to be my demons and fears. I don’t tell her that I think those monkeys are ridiculous.
There’s a thump-thump-thump in the back of my sk
ull, and I am reminded yet again of Mrs. Lewen’s favorite film, this time of that intense interlude when the heroine abandons the sepia tints and unearthly quiet to enter the world of Technicolor. The peonies and rockroses and sweet William and foxgloves that border the curving path appear to deepen in their already intense hues of pink and red and purple. At the other end of the path stands a man.
It is the man from the pier. He is very tall, like you. And very lean, like you, though perhaps a bit thinner. He has your broad shoulders, too. He takes a few steps toward me, and I see that he walks with a limp, as you now do. Despite the limp, I think the way he carries himself is beautiful. The late-afternoon sun is behind him. I am too dazzled by it to make out his features, except for the blue eyes that jump out at me as if they’ve been touched by the nearby larkspurs. He is in a heat haze.
My heart is going bump in my chest. I can hear it. I’m sure I can actually hear it. I’m growing dizzy. My head is too heavy for my neck. It slips from the cradle of my hand and thwacks onto the grass. When I open my eyes, I’m on my left side in the recovery position, confused by how I got into it. I blink several times, hard, trying to clear my blurry vision. I sit up and look all around me, still feeling that I am being watched. But I cannot see the man.
I tell myself he was never there. He can’t have been. I am still too ready to think I’m being followed, even if it’s by somebody I actually want to see. It’s a kind of vertigo, and I know that you are a delusion. I remember that hallucinations are one of the extremely rare side effects of this new anti-emetic. Fuzzy eyes are on the list, too, as well as dizziness and altered heartbeat. I seem to have all of it. I’m going to have to ask Dr. Haynes to change me to a different medicine again. But these are small things. Temporary things. Fixable things. I am here and I am alive.
I rest my hand on my belly. The baby stomps sharply on my bladder as if to tell me she is fine, and I make a noise that is a cry and a laugh at once. I think of the fairy tale my father used to read to me about the maiden whose hands are chopped off, and how she suffers great trials. All that she loses is returned to her, and she is rewarded with more than she ever had. Her hands grow back, too.
But the story forgets to mention that each of her wrists is ringed by a scar. She wears these indelible bracelets for the rest of her life. And she refuses to cover them up, even if they do slowly fade over time.
Acknowledgments
I DIDN’T DO ANY of this alone. I am deeply grateful to my agent, Euan Thorneycroft, for his belief in and championing of The Book of You, and for all of the extraordinary things he does. Without him, The Book of You would not be a book at all. The team at A. M. Heath are incomparable. Euan Thorneycroft and Pippa McCarthy offered editorial advice that helped to make The Book of You better than it otherwise would have been. Jennifer Custer and Hélène Ferey were passionate in bringing the novel to other countries for translation rights; it is a huge privilege for a writer to be able to speak to readers in other languages. Pippa McCarthy and Vickie Dillon helped with countless things that would otherwise have defeated me.
It is a great honor to be published by HarperCollins. To work with so many exceptionally talented people is very special and rare. Sarah Hodgson in the UK, Claire Wachtel in the USA, and Iris Tupholme in Canada offered inspiring and wise editorial guidance. To have any one of them as an editor would be a tremendous privilege; to have all three is an astonishing piece of good fortune. Their perceptiveness and vision are remarkable, as are their consideration, care, and attention.
From HarperCollins UK, I am particularly grateful to Kate Stephenson, for all of her hard work in seeing The Book of You through the production process, for her unparalleled creative input, including the breathtaking shout lines she came up with for the cover, and for her patience and kindness; to Louise Swannell, for handling my publicity with such genius and flair; to Anne O’Brien, for her incredibly careful and elegant copyediting, and responsive reading; to Ben Gardiner, for the enchanting design and typesetting of the novel’s interior; to Dominic Forbes, for the stunning and compelling cover; to Adrian Hemstalk, for turning The Book of You into a material object and ebook that people can actually hold in their hands; to Laura Fletcher and her wonderful sales team of Sarah Collett, Lisa Hunter, and Tom Dunstan; to Lucy Upton, for the brilliant marketing campaign; to Damon Greeney, for coordinating the sale of the novel across HarperCollins’s international markets; and to Eamonn McCabe, for his photographic artistry.
From HarperCollins USA, I am especially grateful to Jonathan Burnham for his support and enthusiasm; to Hannah Wood, for coordinating so many things so beautifully and for helping me navigate the journey from manuscript to book so expertly; to Richard Ljoenes, for the hauntingly beautiful cover; to Michael Correy, for the exquisite design of the novel’s interior; to Heather Drucker, my extremely talented and lovely publicist; to Kathy Schneider and Katie O’Callaghan, for the fantastic marketing campaign; to Emily Walters and Cindy Achar, for seeing the novel through the production process; and to my copy editor, Mary Beth Constant, for her sharp eyes, scrupulous judgement, and careful intelligence.
From HarperCollins Canada, I am particularly grateful to Doug Richmond, for making sure everything came together so perfectly; to Maria Golikova, who managed the elegant Canadian catalog copy; to Sonya Koson, my wonderful publicist; and to the team of Noelle Zitzer, Maria Golikova, Allegra Robinson, and Kelly Hope, for their collaborative effort in seeing the Canadian edition of The Book of You through production.
Richard Kerridge’s intellectual and imaginative influence has been powerfully formative; he has my heartfelt gratitude for his constantly wise judgement, painstaking support, and brilliant advice. Gerard Woodward is a generous and knowledgeable friend and mentor; his advocacy of The Book of You meant more to me than I can say. Sheryl’s very dear friendship has sustained me for as long as I can remember. Colin Edwards and Julia Green were kind and gentle and constructive when I needed them. Richard Francis and Christopher Nicholson were there for me when I sought wise guidance. Richard Kerridge, Gerard Woodward, and Richard Francis also offered insightful critical responses to the novel, as did Tim Liardet, Suzanne Woodward, Miranda Liardet, Ellen McWilliams, and Ross Davis. I am hugely indebted to the firemen who helped with this book and patiently answered my many questions; they embody all that is good. Any errors and fabrications are my own.
My father is the most patient reader imaginable. My mother has the gift of unwavering wisdom and true beauty. Her love and support, and my father’s, have always been my touchstone. Uncle Gary and Auntie Barbara gave me another precious book of fairy tales, and so much else. My sister Bella always tells me the truth and is always on my side—she is all that her name suggests, and I would be lost without her. My brother Robert showed his usual sweetness and good humor in the face of my unavoidable need to steal his name for one of my characters. My three daughters are magical in all ways, and make everything more meaningful and beautiful.
THE EPIGRAPH FROM “Blue Beard” by Charles Perrault is taken from Four and Twenty Fairy Tales: Selected from Those of Perrault, and Other Popular Writers, translated by J. R. Planché (London and New York: G. Routledge & Co., 1858), p. 4.
Citations from “Fitcher’s Bird,” “The Robber Bridegroom,” and “The Three Snake-Leaves” are all from Grimms’ Household Tales, translated and edited by Margaret Hunt, volume 1 (London: George Bell and Sons, 1884), pp. 72, 165, 178.
About the Author
CLAIRE KENDAL LIVES in the UK, where she lectures in English literature and creative writing. The Book of You is her first novel, and it will be translated into nineteen languages.
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Credits
Cover design by Richard Ljoenes.
Cover photographs: © Karl Gough / Trevillion Images; © Roy Bishop / arcangel-images.com.
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters,
incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE BOOK OF YOU. Copyright © 2014 by Claire Kendal. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
ISBN 978-0-06-229760-0
EPub Edition MAY 2014 ISBN 9780062297624
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The Book of You: A Novel Page 28
