by Val McDermid
'Fuck you, Wheelie,' Magda said without rancour. 'Now it's my turn to ask you a question.'
Catherine raised her eyebrows. 'Fire away, sis.'
'Given you have no boundaries at all when it comes to other people's privacy, how come it's taken you so long to ask me the question?'
3
Jay smiled to herself. She'd learned from her first memoir that the closer she stuck to the structure of a novel, the more her readers would be drawn in. Cliff-hanging chapter endings and hints of what was to come, that was what kept the reader glued to the book. She'd been reluctant to revisit some parts of her past, but now she was getting into her stride, she was finding it surprisingly satisfying to see it take shape. And with the trial over, she found her focus was much stronger. Clearly, she'd been more stressed by what had been happening in court than she liked to admit to herself.
Acknowledging that made her wonder whether she'd had any understanding of her stress levels when Jess had died. At the time, she'd just kept her head down and done what she had to do. Thinking about it now, it must have had more of an impact than she'd realised. It was worth bearing that in mind as she wrote the next section. It wouldn't hurt to show a little vulnerability, a hint of grappling with grief.
I was eating breakfast alone in the dining hall when I heard the news. In spite of Jess's cruel barb, Louise and I had made a point of never coming in to breakfast together, though generally one would join the other as she was finishing her toast and coffee. But that morning, Louise hadn't appeared yet. I was sitting with a view of the entrance; after her threats of the previous morning, the last thing I wanted was Jess creeping up on me.
The news started as a murmur and gasp at the far end of the room, generated by the arrival of a handful of dishevelled rowers. They were normally among the first in to breakfast, desperate for calories to replace those they'd just used up in their early-morning exertions on the river. But today, they were late. And Jess was not among them.
The report snaked up and down the refectory tables, knots of people forming in the aisles. 'Jess Edwards is dead,' I eventually heard someone say in shocked and amazed tones a couple of seats from me. I dropped my fork with a clatter.
'Jess?' I exclaimed. 'Jess Edwards?'
'Yeah,' the woman who had just sat down diagonally opposite me confirmed. `I just heard, at the serving hatch.' She jerked her head towards the rowers, now sitting hunched over cups of coffee, their shoulders angled to make themselves a self-contained group. 'They found her.'
'That's awful! What happened?' someone else demanded before I could ask the same thing.
'Nobody knows yet,' our informant said. 'They found her in the river. Face down. At the end of the meadow, by the boathouse. She was caught up in one of the willows. They were just launching the boat this morning when one of them saw her legs.'
'Oh my God. That must have been horrendous. I can't believe it,' I said, almost to myself. A complicated mix of emotions was swirling through me. I was appalled by the death of one of my contemporaries. No matter how difficult things had been between us, Jess was someone at the same point in her life as I was, and I was alive to the terrible tragedy of her death. But I'd be dishonest if I didn't admit to a sense of relief. Jess was dead but I was safe. Even if Jess's cohorts knew about the plan for the smear campaign, her death would thrust them into far too much disarray to capitalise on it.
I pushed my chair back with a screech of wood on wood and stood up. 'I just can't take it in,' I said, walking out of the dining hall like a woman in a dream.
Inevitably, my feet took me out of the Sackville Building and into the misty gardens. I scrambled down the rockery steps to the river bank and walked slowly towards the meadow. I didn't have to go far before I could see an area taped off and the dark shapes of police officers standing around by the boathouse. It was real. Jess was dead. She had been one of the golden girls of my generation, and now it was all over for her.
An event like that can be a defining moment for the group touched by it. I won't pretend we were friends, but the memory of Jess Edwards rises up before me several times a year. Every University Boat Race, I think of her leading the college boat to victory. Whenever I watch young athletes, I remember the strength and beauty of her body. I regret the loss of promise, and I wonder what she would have made of her life. I look at the lives of the other golden girls and remind myself that most of them haven't done anything spectacular, as if that were some sort of consolation. It isn't, of course.
Was that the right note? The trick was to appear candid without actually indulging in candour. Jay knew that absolute honesty was a complete non-starter, not just for her but for anyone engaging in an enterprise like this. The truth was she'd been bloody glad when Jess Edwards had died. It had suited her at the time and even now she didn't think the world was any the poorer for the absence of another over-privileged Tory bitch with an overdeveloped sense of entitlement.
And that was an impossible thing to say. Maybe the structures of fiction were working so well for her because that was what she was really writing.
By dinner, the word was all over college. It looked as if Jess had gone down to the boathouse earlier than usual. According to one of her fellow oarswomen, she'd been complaining that her seat wasn't sliding freely enough, so the supposition was that she'd gone down to do something technical to it. It had been damp and misty, the ground underfoot slippery and muddy. Jess appeared to have lost her footing on the landing stage, hit her head on the edge of the jetty and tumbled unconscious into the water, where she'd drowned. A tragic accident, the consensus said, a verdict echoed in due course by the coroner. For my part, I promised my first task as JCR President would be to insist the college laid a non-slip surface on the landing stage. It was too little, too late, but it was the best thing I could do to honour her memory.
Because there was nothing to stop me becoming JCR President now.There were a couple of other candidates, but in truth, it had been a two-horse race between me and Jess. The election three days later was a walkover.There had been some murmurings about postponing it until after Jess's funeral, but tradition has always been a powerful argument in an Oxford college. And besides, the incumbent was determined to give up office at the end of term so she could concentrate on working for her finals. Her reminder that Jess cared about St Scholastika's and that she wouldn't have wanted her death to interfere with the proper running of the Junior Common Room was enough to make sure everything ran to the appropriate timetable.
So it was as President-Elect of the JCR that I contributed to Jess's funeral. I spoke about the importance of difference, the need for opposition so that ideas could be tested. I recalled Jess's wholehearted commitment to everything she did and how much we would miss her. And it came from the heart, even surprising me a little with its power. People who were in St Mary the Virgin that day remembered my address for years, or so they told me when they bumped into me at college celebrations or in real life.
Jay stood up and walked away from the computer. The next section would have to be perfectly poised and she wanted to think it through before she tried to put pen to paper. Once, she would have gone to a climbing wall and let her subconscious mind do the work while she was intent on putting together a sequence of hand- and footholds that would take her to the top of the wall with a degree of panache. These days, that was beyond her. The injuries she'd sustained in the incident that had claimed the life of her business partner, Kathy Lipson, hadn't seemed too bad at the time. Just torn ligaments in one knee, stiffness from the cold, a painful twist in the lower back. No big deal. But as the years had slipped away, it had become clear that the damage had plugged into genetic neurological predispositions. Her fingers lacked the strength to grip, her knees no longer wanted to crab across rock faces, her toes cramped in cracks. She was a liability on a mountain, bereft of the one physical activity she'd ever found any point in.
Now, she walked. There was no challenge in it, but there was rhythm and rhythm
made her mind work. She loved to walk by the Thames, the river on one side and the traffic on the other. It was where she constructed business plans, resolved problems and built strategies for dealing with people. It was also where she practised her writing, figuring out how to tell the story that was in her memory in such a way that it made sense. Shaping and reshaping, organising her material in different arrangements, transforming the untidy into a pleasing form.
The next section she would write was about Corinna and it couldn't be dodged. There was no way to write this part of the story with full weight and resonance without including what had happened between her and Magda's mother. Of course it would be easier in some ways to ignore it altogether. Whatever Jay wrote, it was going to provoke unease between the two of them. She had to negotiate a way through the truth that they could all live with. And that wasn't going to be easy.
Jay made her way through the warren of tight little streets that brought her on to the Chelsea Physic Garden. Sometimes she walked from the Chelsea Embankment to Blackfriars and beyond if she was in the grip of a particular problem. But since Magda had arrived to fill so much of her life, writing time had become even more precious. She didn't want to spend any more time away from the keyboard than she needed to.
She walked briskly along the paths, paying no real attention to what she was seeing. As she walked, she munched Cox's Orange Pippins, her jaw grinding in counterpoint to her footsteps. There had to be a way of doing this that told enough truth so that nobody would quibble while at the same time disguising the darker side of Jay's real reactions and responses.
Rehearsing it as she walked, Jay eventually came up with what she hoped would keep everybody more or less happy. Her stride lengthened and her eyes sparkled as she retraced her steps at a brisker pace, eager to get back and try it out.
Not everything went as smoothly as my accession to the presidency, however. Inevitably, the ugly gossip that Jess had started did not die with her. People had begun to talk. There were times when I wondered if the feminist revolution had ever happened.
Some of you reading this will wonder whether I was paranoid. I know it's hard to believe I'm talking about 1993, not 1973. In the outside world, there were openly lesbian tennis players, actors and writers. Not many, admittedly, but some. Yet the world I inhabited was still fiercely homophobic even if it pretended otherwise. Oxford graduates tended to gravitate towards the kind of careers where gender equality was regarded with polite incredulity - never mind gay liberation. So nobody wanted to be branded as a lesbian, not even by association.
And yet, part of me wanted to believe I could dare to be different. Once I was safely ensconced as JCR President I refused to worry. Indeed, I even considered coming out and making a principled stand of it, but Louise had issued a panicked veto as soon as I broached the subject. If I came out, Louise had argued, then she would be forced into the open also. And unlike me, she was still firmly attached to her family and her home, where staunch adherence to the moral principles of the Catholic Church still held sway. To be lesbian in Louise's family would be to acknowledge that you were living in mortal sin, and she was not ready for that.
'It's all right for you,' she murmured in my arms in the early hours. 'You're gay. You know you're a lesbian. I don't. I know I love you, but that doesn't mean I have to be like you.'
So I held back. I reasoned that, if I ignored the rumour, it would fizzle and die when something more interesting came along. I was naive; I didn't understand the damage that might flow from those poisonous words.
It had started seemingly innocently. The day of the election, I left a note in Corinna's message pigeonhole confirming I'd meet her that evening as usual for a drink. I was eager to celebrate and in spite of my relationship with Louise, Corinna was still someone I wanted to share my moment of glory with. On my way out to our rendezvous, I checked my own pigeonhole and found a note from Corinna. 'Dear Jay, I'm going to have to take a rain check on tonight. Henry's mother is about to descend upon us, so I'm stuck at home. Apologies. Corinna.'
I was disappointed, but not unduly distressed. It wasn't the first time one or other of us had had to duck out of an arrangement. There would be plenty of opportunities to catch up, or so I thought.
I was wrong. The following day, another message from Corinna arrived. 'Dear Jay, with Henry's mother in residence, I won't need you to babysit Friday night. No doubt you won't be short of things to do! Corinna.' I felt mildly cross, having grown accustomed to the useful and regular supplement to my grant that babysitting for Corinna had become. But I knew relations between Corinna and her mother-in-law had always been awkward and that Dorothy would be insulted if I had turned up to take care of the children when she was in the house.
I waited for a note from Corinna to arrange our next evening out; she wasn't teaching me that term, so unless we bumped into each other around college, we communicated by notes. I waited in vain. Two weeks had passed since that initial cancellation, though I barely noticed the days slip by. There was the routine weight of academic work. There were the new responsibilities of office, where I had to bring myself up to speed with the current state of play and then develop my strategies for the changes I planned to institute. And of course, there was my relationship with Louise, still fresh, still exciting but also demanding.
Then, one afternoon, I was at an intercollegiate meeting of JCR Presidents in St John's. For once, the meeting finished earlier than I anticipated, and since I was less than five minutes by bike from Corinna's, I decided to drop in for tea. Corinna's car was in the drive, and I could see through the lit windows of the basement that the kids were home. I walked round to the side door and leaned my bike against the wall. As usual, I rang the bell and turned the door handle to walk in. To my surprise, it was locked. In all the time I'd been coming to the house, I'd never known Corinna lock the door in daylight hours.
I frowned and stepped back, feeling strangely rebuffed. I could hear footsteps on the stairs leading up from the basement, and moments later, the door swung open. Corinna stood there, looking faintly worried. Behind her, I could just see Patrick rounding the newel post at the bottom of the stairs. 'Oh. Jay,' Corinna said abruptly. 'You picked a really bad moment. We're just about to go out.'
'No we're not,' Patrick said. 'You just put a pie in the oven.'
Corinna flushed, half-turning to shoot a look at Patrick that sent him scuttling downstairs. 'That's for Henry,' she said crossly, clearly flustered. She took a deep breath and arranged her features in an expression I had never seen before. It was the smile of someone who'd taken a course in facial expressions but had failed the practical. Her eyes stayed anxious, while her mouth curved unconvincingly upwards. 'Sorry,' she said. 'Some other time, huh?'
And the door closed in my face. It was as painful and as humiliating as if Corinna had actually slapped me. I felt weak in the knees, tears smarting my eyes. I was utterly bewildered by so uncompromising a rejection. For over a year, Corinna and her kids had been my family, my home. Corinna had trusted me with her children, with her complaints, with her dreams, and I had reciprocated. And now, with no warning, no explanation, no obvious breach, I was outcast.
Somehow, I turned my bike around and staggered down the drive on nearly steady legs. At the gate, I turned back for one swift glance. Patrick was standing on the window seat in the basement bay window, face blank, staring at me. When I caught his eye, Patrick half-raised one hand. He knew something had changed; it was a valediction, not a wave.
I have never been able to remember anything about the ride back to college except the blinding tears. I could think of only one reason for Corinna's defection. She'd heard the rumours and her affection wasn't enough to overcome her prejudice. Or, more likely, she'd told Henry about the rumours and he'd insisted that I wasn't to be allowed within molesting distance of his precious children.
If such a thing were to happen to Jay Macallan Stewart, entrepreneur and author, anger would sweep through her like a cauterising la
nce. But back then, I lacked the self-assurance for rage. However hard I'd tried, I hadn't managed to embrace gay pride yet, and part of me felt I deserved the scourge of Corinna's treatment, so guilt added to my devastation. I almost sympathised with Corinna, self-loathing piling one pain on another.
The final blow came a couple of days later, again via pigeonhole. I snatched my post greedily, seeing the familiar dashing scrawl on the college envelope. I ripped it open, staking my happiness on the forlorn hope that it was some sort of reconciliation. 'Dear Jay,' Corinna still dared begin. 'As you will recall, you had requested that I be your tutor next term for your moral philosophy option. Unfortunately, I now realise my teaching load will not accommodate this, so I have arranged for you to be taught by Dr Bliss at St Hilda's instead. She'll get in touch directly to make arrangements for you to meet. Yours, Corinna Newsam.'
I stood numb in the middle of the porter's lodge, desperately struggling to keep my composure. Corinna's denial of me felt like a physical wound deep inside. On either side, women jostled me accidentally as they went to check their own post. I saw none of them. All I could see was Patrick at the window, his bleak little face a pale shadow of my own sorrow.
