The Past and Other Lies

by Maggie Joel

  Charlotte smiled faintly in reply. Somewhere in another building a fire alarm began to ring.

  Another bell was ringing. It was the bell in the school gymnasium signalling the end of the first period of the afternoon, a Thursday afternoon during the last week of the summer term. A summer that had ended twenty-five years ago.

  Outside was the clatter of feet, the screams and shouts of a schoolful of children emerging from classrooms and corridors, swarming towards other classrooms and other corridors. The screams and shouts reached a crescendo then faded. Inside the gymnasium an exam was in progress and there was still an hour left to go. Heads raised, listening to the din outside, then lowered again. No one moved.

  No one moved, except for Charlotte, who pushed back her chair from her desk in the seventh row, who stood up right in the middle of a trigonometry question, who knocked her chair with a loud thud onto the parquetry floor and ran out.

  She’d been staring at the trigonometry question for ten, fifteen minutes and she knew the answer, had already worked it out in her head (because really trigonometry was quite simple) but had been unable to write down a single number because her eyes were stinging, her teeth were clenched so tightly her jaw was aching and the hand holding her pencil was shaking so that the only marks she made on the answer booklet resembled small bird tracks.

  Funny how important a maths exam had seemed at the start of the year—at the start of the day, even. And it was odd how much time you spent preparing and practising and worrying about it and how a good maths grade had seemed essential to one’s entrance into the A-level course, into university, into a career, the rest of your life. And yet it all came down to this one stupid question about a man walking five miles on a bearing of 092 degrees that any idiot could answer but that she was suddenly, bewilderingly, unable to put down on the paper.

  Two hours before she had stood outside the girls’ toilet block. Two hours ago someone—Julie Fanshawe, a friend of Jennifer’s—had called her over, had said, all snide-like with that fake schoolgirl concern, Hey Charlotte, there’s something written about you in the girls’ toilets. And Charlotte had marched over there not knowing what to expect but angry. And with a sudden knot twisting her stomach in half.

  And now here she was doing a question on trigonometry. A man walking five miles on a bearing of 092 degrees.

  At which point she’d realised if she stayed in the gym one more minute she was going to be sick. Or worse, cry. She hadn’t made a decision to leave, just found herself pushing back her chair so that it had fallen with a thud onto the floor and she had fled the hall, leaving her exam paper and her answer booklet and her pencil case with her calculator and ruler and protractor on the desk and vividly, agonisingly, aware that every head had turned to stare at her, that three invigilators had started up after her, which was exactly, it was exactly what she hadn’t wanted. Everyone staring.

  A girl running at five miles per hour on a bearing of 092 degrees.

  She escaped across the quadrangle and through the teachers’ car park to the side gate and away. There was a bus pulling up at the bus stop that would have deposited her right outside her house but instead she turned in the opposite direction, running, needing to put distance between herself and the school. When, much later, she arrived home, she fumbled with the front door key, ran straight upstairs and shut herself in the bedroom she still shared with Jennifer.

  If Mum had been home she might have wondered why Charlotte was home at three forty-five when the maths O-level wasn’t scheduled to finish till four o’clock. But Mum wasn’t at home, she was sitting in the waiting room of Dr Caddington’s surgery with Grandma Lake, who needed a new prescription for some unnamed complaint. So when Charlotte arrived home with her school jumper tied around her waist and her face pale and carrying only a pencil there was no one to notice.

  When it became apparent the house was empty she came to a dead stop in the middle of the bedroom, there being nowhere else to run.

  Her school bag was hanging on the back of the door where she’d left it that morning because you were only allowed to take pens and pencils and calculators and protractors and rulers into the exam. Next to the bag was the pink jumper she’d bought Jennifer for her seventeenth birthday last September. Her own seventeenth was less than a month away and she stared at the jumper and her own fast-approaching birthday with equal dismay.

  She snatched up the jumper and clutched it tightly in both fists so that the wool stretched taut. Then she remembered that one of the faces that had stared at her as she’d fled the exam hall had been Zoe’s, and she groaned and sat down on the floor because she would never again visit Zoe’s house in Beechtree Crescent.

  Hours passed. Mum came home. Grandma Lake settled in front of the telly. Tea was served and Jennifer still hadn’t come home from school.

  ‘She’s out with her friends,’ Mum said and no one asked why Charlotte wasn’t out too, when it was the last day of exams. Dad said, How did you do in the exam, then? and Mum said, Aren’t you going to eat that, dear? and then Charlotte went back upstairs.

  Perhaps they assumed Jennifer was out with Darren. But Darren came round at seven looking for her. Charlotte had already finished her tea and was standing at the top of the stairs when the doorbell rang, so it was she who saw Darren’s familiar green parka through the frosted glass of the front door and she who, on the second ring, went woodenly downstairs and opened the door.

  Darren. She stared at him. Jennifer wasn’t with him. She almost closed the door on him because the last thing she wanted, the very last thing, was her sister’s boyfriend standing there in the doorway staring at her.

  ‘Is Jen in?’ Darren said with his northern accent and it was such a normal, Darren thing to say that at first she just stood there.

  ‘No,’ she replied at last. Where was Jen? Probably out with her friends drinking milkshakes at Wimpey in the high street or down by the canal talking to boys from the grammar school. Having a good time, at any rate, while her boyfriend was standing here looking for her. Lucky Jennifer. Lucky, popular, pretty Jennifer.

  The door to the lounge was ajar and Dad was watching Capital Tonight.

  ‘...a sheep dip in Tower Hamlets,’ Naomi Findlay, longtime presenter of the program, announced obscurely in her perfectly enunciated Home Counties voice. The incongruity of such words taken out of context seemed to give them portent, like words spoken by a prophet. A sheep dip in Tower Hamlets.

  Charlotte took a deep breath, a hard lump filling her stomach. It had been there most of the afternoon, but now it began to glow hot and red, and it travelled up her spine and flushed her cheeks so that they burned. The pounding that had been beating away behind her eyeballs all evening quickened then suddenly vanished.

  ‘I’m sorry, Darren.’ Her mouth assumed the shape of a sympathetic smile. ‘Jen’s out with Adrian Cresswell.’

  The words slid from her mouth as smoothly as the truth might have done. Adrian Cresswell. He and Jennifer had briefly been an item in third year, everyone knew that. The lie was so believable it could almost have been the truth.

  Darren’s lips parted slightly, his eyes widened. He swallowed, the way you did when you were in pain.

  ‘She’s been out with him a lot this week,’ Charlotte continued. ‘I expect she told you she was out with Nikki and Julie?’

  Darren swallowed but said nothing.

  ‘I told her to tell you, I told her it wasn’t fair on you, particularly now everyone at school knows about it...’

  That was it, of course. That was the killer punch: everyone at school knows about it. Yes, she knew how that felt.

  She thought about saying ‘I’m so sorry’ again, but that would have been overdoing it so she just smiled awkwardly, the way a sister might have smiled in such a situation.

  Darren’s eyes glassed over and it seemed as though he was going to demand to know more but instead he turned abruptly and walked, almost ran really, down the driveway and into the light cast by
the streetlamp. Then he was gone and Charlotte closed the front door after him and went up the stairs to her room.

  ‘Who was it?’ Mum called from the lounge.

  ‘No one. Double-glazing salesman,’ she replied, then she closed the bedroom door and there on the floor was Jennifer’s pink jumper with red lipstick all over its front just as though someone had deliberately drawn on it.

  Jennifer had come home eventually, giggling and tripping over the loose carpet on the landing and making the bedroom stink of cheap cider—it was a Friday night near the end of term after all. But by the following night Darren had been seen down at the canal with Roberta Peabody and Jennifer had sobbed noisily long into the night while Charlotte had lain hard and cold in bed and stared at the shadows on the wall.

  In the unheated meeting room that was currently home to the Waverley University Academic Dress Sub-Committee, the clock inched forward to nine fifty-one and Charlotte was preparing to speak: We could always take a vote on it. These were the words she would say. Not the most scintillating words ever spoken, it was true, and as suggestions went it was hardly pithy, but it was at least constructive. She would say it.

  Nine fifty-three.

  A second scene popped into her head. Herself and Nick, who was now Jennifer’s ex, though at the time he was her fiancé, seated in a small cafe just off the Embankment. Another scene and another lie twenty years after the first scene, the first lie. But connected, she suddenly realised, because she’d still felt guilty about Darren McKenzie. Had continued to feel guilty right up until Jennifer’s wedding.

  Nine fifty-five.

  At least as far as lies went this one had passed unnoticed and that was important, more important than the fact that her sister had been having an affair with a work colleague a month before her wedding. But the lie had been told and the wedding had gone ahead.

  Still, Jennifer and Nick were divorced now, so what did it matter?

  The cafe was a classic greasy spoon tucked beneath the shadow of Waterloo Bridge. The lie was this:

  ‘Honestly, Nick, do you really believe Jen would be out getting measurements for her wedding dress if she was having an affair with someone else?’

  That was it. Hardly a lie at all, really, if you thought about it. Just a question, in fact. A question asked over a lukewarm coffee in a cafe just off the Embankment on a cold February lunchtime four years ago, and after she’d asked it, Charlotte picked up her chipped mug and held it to her lips and swallowed down a lukewarm mouthful because she liked her future brother-in-law and she had just lied to his face because she owed it to Jennifer.

  It was a Saturday lunchtime and the cafe was busy with tourists staring mutely at the stale croissants and limp salads on their plates and at the stained cutlery with which they were expected to eat it. Nick was wearing a sweater and a sports jacket and looked wealthier than he really was so that for a moment Charlotte had felt proud to be seen with him—it was a novelty, this going out to lunch with a good-looking man—but the feeling had frozen inside her when Nick had said the one thing that he wasn’t meant to say.

  I think Jen’s seeing someone behind my back.

  This wasn’t a question, not technically, so she could simply have not answered, but there was Darren McKenzie, always Darren McKenzie.

  So she had answered him at once, reassuringly, unequivocally.

  Anyone who had genuinely known nothing of the affair might have paused to ask Nick why he thought such a thing and who the affair was supposed to be with anyway. But she hadn’t asked these things. Instead, she had jumped in with her denial so rapidly there was no room left for discussion and no time to ponder the morality of it all.

  She’d already done the pondering. Had been pondering for the month prior to this conversation. In fact, ever since she’d overheard a message she wasn’t meant to overhear on Jennifer’s answering machine. A message from someone called Adam who had been very keen for Jennifer to come over that night.

  ‘Oh, Adam!’ Jennifer had said, rolling her eyes at Charlotte’s questions. ‘Adam works with me, that’s all. We go out. We have fun. It’s not serious.’

  But the wedding was serious, and by the time Charlotte and Nick were sitting in the cafe just off the Embankment, the wedding was in seven days and Jennifer was still having fun with Adam. Charlotte had almost not come to the cafe. A part of her had believed Nick couldn’t possibly suspect and that, if he did, there was no way he would ask her about it. A part of her, a large part, had believed it was none of her business and it was best not to get involved. A tiny, minuscule, insignificant part of her had remembered Darren McKenzie and felt guilty.

  It was the tiny, minuscule, insignificant part of her that had said, ‘Honestly, Nick, do you really believe Jen would be out getting measurements for her wedding dress if she was having an affair with someone else?’

  The rest of her had been appalled.

  ‘Why don’t you ask her?’ she added, swallowing the wretched coffee and trying desperately to rescue the situation.

  ‘What’s the point?’ Nick looked down at the red and white plastic tablecloth then looked up into her face. ‘She’d only deny it.’

  ‘Well, there you are!’ There had been a moment’s silence. ‘I mean, if you can’t trust each other, what good is that?’ which meant that now it was Nick’s fault as much as Jennifer’s if the marriage didn’t work because he hadn’t trusted her. It certainly wasn’t Charlotte’s fault.

  What would he do, she wondered, if I said, Yes, you’re right, Jen’s having an affair? Would he believe me and not her? How is it that their marriage depends on me?

  Instead, she had stood up, knocking the table and causing the coffee to spill over the edge of Nick’s cup and form a pool in the centre of the table. She was going to be Jennifer’s bridesmaid and Nick would soon be her brother-in-law. She liked Nick, he was a nice guy.

  ‘I have to go. Look, it’ll be fine,’ and that was another lie, though perhaps not as shameful as the first.

  ‘I believe Environmental Studies went with empire blue in the end,’ Dr McGill of Linguistics was saying. ‘Something to do with a charter from the sixteenth century,’ he added mysteriously.

  Charlotte jerked back to the present and caught Dave Glengorran’s eye across the table. Dave had arrived late and was now tearing strips from the agenda and screwing them up into balls, which he was flicking off the end of his pen in the general direction of the wastepaper bin. Dave had said nothing either.

  ‘Well, there’s always damask,’ he said suddenly and a little impatiently, as though this was a suggestion that ought to have been made some time ago. ‘After all, that’s what the University of London wears.’

  ‘Damask!’ spluttered Professor Kendall. ‘The Chancellor wears damask, a damask robe. You cannot graduate with a Bachelor of Arts in a damask robe.’ He took a deep breath and noisily reshuffled his papers. ‘We need to decide today! I must make the Sub-Committee’s recommendation to the Vice Chancellor this week.’

  ‘All we want is gold cord,’ insisted the younger of the three Media Studies lecturers, a girl with large spectacles and blue hair.

  ‘Or sulphur, at a pinch,’ said her colleague, the thin wiry boy with the goatee and skinny jeans.

  There was a tense silence.

  ‘Could we maybe look at a compromise here?’

  Everyone turned to look at Ashley. She had tossed aside her pencil and was sitting up with a sudden air of determination and Charlotte’s heart sank. That was it then. Dave had spoken, Ashley had spoken, and she was now the only one left who had remained silent.

  ‘You guys want cord and you people say they gotta have tassels. Okay then, have both. Have the gold cord. Have the goddamn gold tassels. And why don’t we all wear damask robes?’

  The room erupted.

  ‘Everyone, please, I must insist on one person speaking at a time!’ Professor Kendall paused to mop his brow with a handkerchief despite the near-zero room temperature. ‘It’s ten o�
�clock and many of us have a Finance Committee meeting to attend, so may I suggest that we adjourn and meet again next week and may I beg you all to come to some sort of agreement on this issue?’ He looked around the room.

  Charlotte sat on the edge of her seat, the words Isn’t this the most absurd waste of all our time...? perched right on the tip of her tongue, flexing and about to dive into the verbal arena. Her mouth felt dry and her palms started to sweat.

  ‘I believe this room is free for a meeting next Wednesday, Professor Kendall,’ she announced instead, the words bursting from her chest like a cough she had tried to suppress. ‘There was a memo—the Misconduct and Discipline Review Board meeting has been postponed...’

  She sat back again, her heart pounding. Well, at least she had said something. And then her mobile beeped and she was surprised to see she’d missed two calls from Aunt Caroline.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  AUGUST 1981

  JENNIFER RETCHED VIOLENTLY, bringing up barely digested shepherd’s pie and peas. Perhaps, she realised afterwards, vomiting in such dramatic fashion actually helped things along a bit. At any rate, Mum came running up the stairs, buckets were proffered, glasses of water, soothing words, searching questions.

  And all the while she knew that Charlotte was sitting silent and unnoticed in the doorway to their bedroom as though she had no part in any of this. As if she were merely a bystander.

  When eventually Mum thought to look in on her, Charlotte had climbed into bed and was lying under the covers in a way that wordlessly and innocently proclaimed her own sickness. And she looked sick too, so still and pale and silent that Mum was on the verge of telephoning Dr Caddington. She was dissuaded, fortunately, from this course of action, but what could be more believable? Two sisters struck down with the same affliction. Some bug picked up at school, no doubt. Children are always picking up bugs at school.