Seven Lies

by Elizabeth Kay

  “Did you end it with that boy?” she asked. Stanley and I had been on two previous dates, one of which hadn’t been awful, and I’d told her about it—the picnic in the park, the drinks in the pub—when I’d visited the previous week. But I’d also told her that he was a lawyer, that he was boring at his best, that his only saving grace was his very soft hair.

  I could see that she was proud to have remembered our previous conversation. Often she could remember the tone of a discussion—if she was angry with me or pleased or if she simply enjoyed the company—but sometimes she remembered small details. I remember wondering then if she wrote them down when I left, prompts for the following week, ways to stay connected when her mind was trying so very hard to disengage.

  “Stanley?” I asked.

  “Maybe.” She shrugged. “I don’t have enough space in here”—she tapped her forehead—“to remember all the names.”

  “Then, yes,” I said. “I did it last night.”

  “Good,” she said. “He didn’t sound much like a Jonathan to me.”

  My mother’s dementia had—somewhat conveniently—erased her memories of my relationship with Jonathan. Her recollection was simply that I fell in love and then he died. Which wasn’t what had happened at all.

  It wasn’t that my parents disliked Jonathan. In fact, I think they quite liked him: he was magnetic and funny and always very polite. But I think they liked him in the way that parents like an early boyfriend. He was fine. He would do. But he wasn’t what they envisaged when they imagined me married.

  They were livid when I told them we were engaged. Having failed to agree on a single thing for the previous decade, they were both adamant that I was making an irreversible mistake. They argued that we were too different. He loved space and fresh air; I loved the coziness of my own home. He loved people and noise; I loved familiarity and silence. I think they felt that he wasn’t good enough, wasn’t smart enough, didn’t earn enough as a cameraman. I didn’t care.

  In the weeks after we’d gotten engaged, my mother would call me repeatedly, sometimes multiple times in a single day, to insist that I was ruining my life. She ranted relentlessly, zealously, telling me that love wasn’t easy and that it was far too complex, too multifaceted for me to possibly understand and that marriage was for another time, another decade, another life. She claimed that we were too young, too naive, too set on something beyond our comprehension. In the background, I could hear the air whistling past the mouthpiece as she paced the hallway at home, the sharp turns at either end of the corridor, the wild sighs between sentences. She didn’t quite say it, not in these words, but I think she was trying to protect me from her mistake, from a marriage that had narrowed every part of who she once was into a few wilting words: into “wife,” into “mother,” into “heartbreak.”

  She told me that I had to make a choice; I chose Jonathan.

  Perhaps it should have been a difficult decision. But it wasn’t.

  When Jonathan and I were alone, we were both entirely ourselves. That was my greatest joy, having found someone with whom I could be myself and who, in turn, was his truest self for me. When we were with others, my parents in particular, we were both a little better—that little bit funnier, that little bit nicer, that little bit more in love. We amplified ourselves in order to be the sort of couple that made others comfortable. He made jokes at my expense, lighthearted gibes that elicited laughter from the other men, from my father, and I was politer, bringing him drinks and asking if he wanted anything more and encouraging him to just shout if he needed something from the kitchen. And we touched in a way that sometimes felt contrived, his arm around my waist, my head against his shoulder. When we were alone, our bodies bled into one, limbs entangled, skin stretched against skin.

  It was an easy choice.

  I suppose I thought that my mother would surrender in time, that she’d decide that she could live with my marriage. It didn’t seem fair that this should be the moment when she reinstated her motherly love.

  When I was nearly four years old, my sister, Emma, was born seven weeks early in a wave of chaos. She was rushed to intensive care and deposited in an incubator as my mother was wheeled into surgery to stem some unstoppable bleeding. They both returned home several weeks later but, in just that one month, everything had changed. From then on, my mother became more and more obsessive, fretting increasingly over her younger daughter: asking always is she cold, and is she hungry, and is she breathing. I became closer to my father as a result—he could do nothing right in those first few months—but my mother was there for me only in body. She wasn’t interested in bedtime stories, or first school photographs, or the intricacies of what went on during a child’s day. She hasn’t really been interested in me since and so I couldn’t believe that she felt me worthy of her attention in adulthood.

  Shortly after my wedding, my father asked my mother for a divorce and moved out. Judy, his secretary and long-term mistress, had been widowed a year earlier. She’d threatened to leave my father if he didn’t commit to her fully. My mother’s threats had always felt unconvincing, but evidently Judy’s were not. It was no surprise to any of us that my father chose her.

  I thought my mother might need me more in the aftermath of that loss. I guess I should have known better.

  There was a year when we didn’t speak to each other at all. I remember expecting a phone call on my birthday—because surely mothers and daughters are bound by birth, if nothing else—but it never came. I didn’t hear from her when Jonathan died. I wondered if she would attend the funeral. She didn’t. I hadn’t given her the details, but I suppose I thought—maybe I even hoped—that she might have asked for them from somebody else.

  But then, unexpectedly, just a month or so later, she started sending me emails, one or two a week, nothing significant, just updates on her life, things that made her think of me: a new furniture shop on the high street, an article in a magazine, a trailer she’d seen for a film that she thought I might enjoy.

  I replied eventually—I’d seen the film and I thought it tedious—and somehow we settled into an uncomfortable dialogue. I was angry with her at the time, really angry, because there was so much still unsaid. I found myself inserting those small truths, those small angers, into my messages and into our conversations, concealed in sharp asides and abrupt sign-offs and sometimes in long delays between responses. It was far easier to pick at those scars than address the mighty grief swelling within me.

  I hated her. I really did. And then, one day, I didn’t. She, too, had lost the man she loved. And then she lost so much more: her mind, her memories. Our lives were in very different places and yet we were both broken, and we found something familiar in each other’s jagged edges. After more than twenty years of failing to understand each other, we finally had something in common.

  Eventually I found that I, too, could erase my memories of the drama; they weren’t the actions of this woman, of this mother, but of some other person, now lost to the pleats of history and time.

  “No,” I said eventually. “Stanley wasn’t at all like Jonathan.”

  “Then you’re well rid,” she said. “Don’t you think?”

  “I’d say so,” I replied.

  I turned on the television and we watched the news together. A teenager had been stabbed; his assailant was disguised in a grainy photograph, an image frozen from CCTV. A disgraced politician spoke to the press, explaining without apology, justifying his actions. A young mother sobbed; her benefits had been revoked and she was unable to afford childcare in order to work or to work in order to fund childcare. We were shocked and unsurprised and then sad, our expressions twisting in unison.

  The newsreader eventually bid us farewell and I gathered my coat and my handbag and snuck back into the hallway, leaving my mother asleep and the television murmuring the opening credits for a new quiz show.

  * * *


  I’m telling you about my mother because it’s important that you understand her role in this story. I did hate her, but I also forgave her. Remember that.

  Chapter Seven

  I didn’t have a date to bring to Marnie and Charles’s the following Friday, but I regularly visited alone, and I was very much looking forward to it. Until Marnie called me at midday to say that I couldn’t come for dinner that evening because Charles had organized a surprise weekend in the Cotswolds. She rang from the car and I could hear the hiss of other vehicles rushing past on the motorway. I wondered how long she had known she was going away. She must have been told at least a few hours earlier. Because she’d had time to pack and drive out of the city with its tight streets, small and cramped, bordered by parked cars and with red lights every few hundred yards. She could have called earlier.

  “Whereabouts are you going?” I asked, although I don’t know why: I wasn’t particularly interested in the answer.

  “Some hotel,” she said. I heard the crackle of her phone against her cheek and I imagined her turning toward Charles, who would have been sitting next to her, in the driver’s seat as always, dictating their path. “What’s it called?” she asked.

  I heard him speaking, not individual, isolated words but a murmuring, the timbre of his voice echoing against the metal innards of the car.

  “He can’t remember,” said Marnie. “But it’s . . .”—that crackle again—“Google says we’ll be there in two hours.”

  I pictured them sitting side by side: Marnie’s shoes lying abandoned in the footwell, her feet curled up on the seat against her thighs; Charles in a smart shirt and warm jumper, ever aware of the autumn chill, the sort of man who liked to drive with the window down and his elbow perched on the open ledge.

  “Jane!” I heard him shout. And then more quietly, tenderly even, “Can she hear me?”

  “I can hear him,” I said.

  “Go on,” Marnie replied, but not to me. “She says she can.”

  “Jane!” he shouted again. “Can I get a favor? I’d like this beautiful woman to myself for the weekend. What do you reckon?” he continued. I pressed my thumb to the earpiece to smother the sound. “Can you do that? Just forty-eight hours. You’ll be all right.”

  Marnie laughed, a girlish titter, and so I laughed, too, and I shouted, “Sure thing. She’s all yours.” Because what else was I to do? What else could I have said? I knew what this meant.

  “But we’ll see you next week?” said Marnie. “Same time as normal?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Same time as normal.”

  “Let me know if Stanley’s coming,” she said.

  “He won’t be,” I replied.

  “Oh,” she said. “Really? That’s such a shame.” She was surprised in the way that optimists so often are by facts that betray the fantasy. She always hopes, always assumes, that the next man will be the right man, which is foolish because the evidence suggests otherwise. She has never met any of my suitors, as she calls them, more than a couple of times. “Well, let me know if you want to bring anyone else,” she said.

  Marnie ended the call and I listened to the silence where her voice had been seconds before. I knew what was coming and I knew, too, that I was afraid. I took a deep breath, inhaling noisily, because my chest was tight, my ribs sort of shivering, and because air kept catching in my throat.

  You know already that there was an engagement ring. I had assumed that it was still in Charles’s bedside table; I’d had no reason to believe otherwise. But, in that moment, I was quite sure that it was on the road, slipped inside a jacket pocket or in the front pouch of a suitcase or in the glove box of that shiny white car.

  As I lay in bed that evening, I pictured it in their hotel room, tucked in the drawer of a new bedside table, lying in wait until the perfect moment. I could see it housed in its red velvet box, a gold band with three bright white diamonds.

  I hated the thought of it. I hated the thought that she might marry him.

  As a child, Marnie’s relationship with her parents had been strained: more like coworkers than relatives. Her mother and father were both doctors and very successful in their respective fields. They had always traveled, and so Marnie and her older brother, Eric, had been left at home for weeks at a time ever since they were old enough to get themselves to school and to cook their own meals. Her parents turned up on the good days—the parents’ evenings, the school plays—but they weren’t particularly present. She had no one there on the bad days, the normal days, the everydays that make up a life.

  Until me. That was my role. I loved her completely, unconditionally, without question.

  Charles thought that he could fill that space, too. But he was wrong. Because a bottle of champagne sent across the bar isn’t selfless but showy. An expensive flat isn’t generous. It’s desperate and excessive. And an extravagant ring isn’t a symbol of commitment but of blind confidence, the sort of arrogance deemed acceptable only in a man like Charles.

  * * *

  I had discovered the ring a few months earlier.

  Marnie and Charles were about to go on holiday for a week. They were going to the Seychelles, I think—perhaps it was Mauritius—and we were due to have a heat wave in London. Marnie had been fretting about the plants on her balcony, if they would survive seven days with strong sunshine and no rain. And Charles was saying that she was ridiculous, because they were just plants and she could always buy some more.

  I ate my dinner listening to their bickering and keeping very deliberately quiet. I’d be lying if I said that I received no satisfaction from the squabble—I enjoyed seeing Charles fail to understand Marnie—but I knew that there was nothing to be gained by my intervention. Even so, I wanted to tell Charles not to be such an arsehole, to say that if the plants mattered to Marnie then they should matter to him, too. But I didn’t.

  The following morning Charles called me and asked if I would mind watering the plants while they were away.

  I didn’t have a car; I couldn’t drive. It normally took about half an hour to get from my flat to theirs on the tube and so I knew immediately that it wasn’t going to be particularly convenient.

  I wondered if they had other friends who lived nearer—colleagues of Charles’s perhaps, who could also afford extravagant apartments in old mansion houses. They did; they must have. And yet Charles had asked me.

  Perhaps, I thought, I am their closest friend.

  I knew, of course, that it wasn’t true.

  They had asked me simply because they knew that I’d say yes. Marnie had plenty of other friends—so did Charles—but I was efficient, reliable.

  Charles explained that he would leave their spare key with the concierge and that if I could just pop in after work from Monday through to Friday, and actually once on Saturday would be great, too, then that would be brilliant.

  On the Monday, I left work at half past six, exhausted from a day sitting behind a desk and in front of a screen, trying to explain to restless shoppers why their packages hadn’t arrived at the time they’d elected. I had taken almost ten weeks off when Jonathan died, and when I’d returned, I’d discovered that we were no longer selling furniture and that I’d been moved into the customer service team to answer calls. They were adamant that there’d be opportunities to contribute to the company in a significant way, but it felt like a demotion to me.

  The help line was closed on the weekends and so the beginning of the week was always the worst. By Monday, those whose packages had failed to arrive on Saturday were so irate, so totally beside themselves with frustration—no garden furniture for their barbecue, no presents for their son’s birthday, no outfits for the fancy dress do—that they were entirely unable to contain their rage. They instead spent the best part of an hour hissing and spitting and swearing and shouting into their phones. And I spent an hour soothing and reassuring and promising to correct the
error and topping up their accounts with small sums of compensation.

  I arrived at Marnie and Charles’s flat just after seven.

  “And can I see some ID?” the concierge said when I asked for the key.

  “I don’t have any,” I replied. “But, Jeremy,” I said—he was wearing a name badge—“you’ve seen me here once a week for years. You know who I am. And look, I can see the envelope with the key right there on your desk. Jane Black. You know that’s my name.”

  “No ID?” he repeated.

  “I’m afraid not,” I replied.

  I offered him my sweetest smile and was frankly astounded when he slid the key across the desk conspiratorially and said, “You didn’t get this from me.”

  I took the elevator to their floor and, as the doors parted and I stepped out, the lights in the hallway flickered on. Marnie and I had spent a year stepping out of elevators onto blue carpet and the building I lived in now offered much the same experience (the carpet was taupe, but just as muddied and worn). This building, however, was noticeably different and never failed to make me feel somewhat inferior. The walls were lined with framed artwork, painted signatures adorning the bottom right corners of each piece, and lights hung from the ceiling in neat pendants. The parquet flooring was thickly varnished, glinting under the lights, and the only evidence that any other shoes had ever walked those hallways was a very slight fading, a few small scuffs, at the doors to the two elevators.

  I let myself into their flat and was—stupidly—surprised to find it dark. On Friday evenings I would ring the bell and Marnie would rush to answer, pulling open the door and smiling, and then darting back into the kitchen to stir or to season or to shake. Normally the camera would be set up on the countertop, filming her preparing her latest concoction. Her brief departure—my arrival—featured regularly in her articles, her recipes, and her videos, too.