Seven Lies

by Elizabeth Kay

  We walked home later that evening, her arm looped through mine, and we recounted the madness of our day. She clapped her hands together excitedly when I reminded her that there was no work anymore, that she was free from the nine-to-five of office life. She breathed hot air onto the mirrored wall of the elevator and drew a smiling face with her finger. She jumped on our sofa and insisted that I jump, too. It was silly. It was fun. She held my hands as we bounced. I remember that we were laughing and that it felt so ordinary to laugh noisily together. But now? I struggle to recall what it really felt like to be that way with her, to lose myself in her, to be so effortlessly us.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I visited Marnie and Charles the following Friday—just after they’d returned from their honeymoon—and we were sitting, the three of us, on their sofa. The chandelier overhead was switched off and the wall lamps cast a golden shadow against the walls. There were candles everywhere, flames flickering around their wicks. The balcony was hidden behind thick red curtains hanging in waves.

  It had turned into the wettest August on record and—everyone had agreed: the postman, the weather forecaster, my colleagues—the most miserable in living memory. Every day that week had been obscured by dense, heavy rain, fat droplets that bounced when they hit the sidewalk or the hood of a car.

  “The rain!” said Marnie. “We’d not seen anything like it for weeks, not a drop. Everyone had said that summer in Italy was madness, that we’d roast right through, and they were right. So we weren’t dressed for it at all when we landed back here. We were drenched by the time we got the bags out of the cab and into the lobby. Weren’t we, Charles? Weren’t we drenched?”

  He nodded with the rhythm of her words. “Oh, absolutely,” he replied. “Soaked right through.”

  They said that they had ventured out only once in the last two days, a hasty trip to the supermarket to restock the cupboards, and kept the curtains closed and the windows locked and the rain as far away as possible. Rebecca and James—I recognized the names—had come for lunch the day before.

  “They’ve taken shared parental leave,” said Charles. “They’re both off work. It’s the strangest thing.”

  “Did I tell you they had a baby?” asked Marnie. “She’s four months now. I’ve genuinely never seen a cuter child. She’s adorable. These big, bright eyes, piercingly blue—”

  Charles pointed at my empty wineglass. “Top up?” he asked, and I nodded.

  “He was so good with her,” whispered Marnie, as he went into the kitchen. “Honestly, there is nothing sexier than an attractive man with a baby. He does this swaggery, confident thing, I know, but he’s soppy as anything, really. He wanted to hold her the whole time. He barely let me have a go at all.”

  I smiled and nodded, although I couldn’t imagine it.

  “Did you fill mine?” asked Marnie as Charles returned with the bottle.

  “Of course,” he replied. “It’s on the side.”

  “Thank you,” she said, standing to kiss him. “I better check on dinner.”

  He filled up my glass and then connected his phone to the fancy new television, bought, he said, with gift vouchers from the wedding.

  “I’ll show you some of the photos,” he said, and then explained the intricate details of this specific model—the display, something about pixels, the strength of the processor, and several different acronyms that meant nothing to me. I nodded and smiled and tried to look impressed. I was struck more than anything by the size of it; it was stretched across the entire fireplace.

  I reached for the remote control, which was standing upright in a small wicker basket on the side table. Charles was in front of the screen, facing it, blocking my view, and yet he must have heard my movement because without turning around he said, “Put it down.”

  “Don’t you need—” I began.

  “The control? No. If I need it, I’ll get it. If that’s okay with you, Jane.”

  He twisted, peering over his shoulder, inspecting me, staring at the remote still clasped in my fist. I placed it on the sofa cushion.

  He smiled. “Trust me,” he said. “You’ll be amazed at what this thing can do.”

  He pressed a few buttons and began scrolling through their honeymoon photographs. Somewhat unexpectedly I found myself intrigued by the different locations, the beautiful scenery, that sense of the unfamiliar. I wasn’t so keen on his ongoing commentary—“and that was where we . . .” and “when we visited that beach . . .” and “that was the bathroom of the second hotel”—but the images themselves were quite something. I responded to his questions, to his descriptions, to his endless twaddle—“Oh, what glorious fields,” I said, and, “Sorry, where was that again?”—but I wasn’t really listening.

  Instead I imagined myself on their trip: posing beside Marnie on the Spanish Steps, smiling on a bike at the top of a hill, surrounded by a dozen wineglasses in a vineyard. It was surprisingly easy to erase Charles from each image, to blur his entire being, so that he barely existed. I could unsee his broad shoulders, his tight T-shirts, his white teeth embedded in a perfect smirk. I could unsee his hair, slicked back and thick with gel, and his muscular calves and his golden tan.

  I could hear Marnie in the kitchen, and I amplified her noise to overwhelm his. She was talking into her camera, filming herself as she prepared dinner, describing each step that she was taking, every ingredient added, every slice and stir and shake.

  “I always wash my hands after breaking eggs, particularly when I’m separating out the yolks, and I’ve been doing this quite a while, but it still gets everywhere.”

  “Should you throw spaghetti at the wall to see if it sticks? I mean, it’s entirely up to you, but I firmly believe that it’s the most accurate way to test whether or not your pasta is cooked, and oh”—a yelp—“looks like it is!”

  “Should you put tomatoes in a green salad? Absolutely not.

  “Two minutes,” she called. And then, a little quieter, “When someone’s cooking for me, I’m always grateful to have a little bit of notice before I’m due to sit down to eat because—and maybe this is just me; let me know in the comments if you get this, too—I always need to go to the bathroom before a meal. I don’t know what it is, but I just do!”

  Charles looked over and rolled his eyes—gently, lovingly—and I smiled in response.

  “Right-oh,” he said. “Let’s whiz through the last few before dinner. You’re not bored, are you?”

  I shook my head and he flicked through the photographs at speed—beautiful sunsets, orange and yellow and pink and purple, the rolling hills, rippling in every shade of green, the poppy fields, a canvas of red peppered by small black seeds. Bowls of pasta, platters of cured meats and cheeses, pizzas the size of dustbin lids. Charles on a train, his eyes closed, a crossword half finished on the table in front of him. (You might like to know that crosswords were the only thing that Charles and I could discuss, could do together, without the air thickening around us.)

  He continued to jab at his phone, but the television had frozen and one image remained static and unblinking on the screen. It was a photograph of Marnie, sitting up on a sun lounger, her legs either side of the wooden frame, smiling as she rubbed sunblock onto her arms. Her straw hat hung jauntily over her forehead and her bikini had lifted slightly, revealing the even fairer skin on the underside of her breast. She was smiling, laughing, I think, and I can picture her scolding Charles, like a mother might scold her son, telling him not to take a photo, not then, only when she was ready.

  But I would have taken that photograph, too. Because entirely unaware of the camera she was far more herself, far less stretched and posed and pouting, and far more the woman we both recognized and perhaps loved.

  “That was the last hotel,” said Charles, turning off the television so that the screen snapped back to black. “It had the most incredible restaurant. It had a Michelin
star. We did the tasting menu, which was quite expensive but totally worth it, just delicious.”

  I wondered if perhaps I would one day go on a second honeymoon. I thought it unlikely then and I think it even less likely now.

  Marnie called us to the table.

  “I’ve made carbonara,” she said. She looked at me as she pulled out her seat. “But not the normal one, not the one we used to make at the flat.” She turned to Charles. “It’s an homage to our honeymoon,” she said. “With the recipe from that hilltop place. Do you remember the one? Did you show Jane the pictures from the top? The food there was just—” She held her fingers to her lips and kissed them: a loud, wet mwah. “I had to beg for the recipe—a family classic, apparently—but it’s particularly good, I think. Better than the one we did in the flat. I’ll stop rambling. I’ll let you try it.”

  She scooped a large serving into my bowl and a ridiculous portion onto Charles’s plate. He didn’t like to eat from bowls. He didn’t like it when the different constituents of a meal mixed together. He didn’t want to have spaghetti and salad in the same mouthful.

  I twisted my fork against the lip of my bowl, and I could see straightaway that the texture was different. The eggs had formed a silky coating around each strand of spaghetti. Our carbonara—and don’t get me wrong; I liked it, and I still think it’s my favorite—was clumpy with lumps of scrambled egg.

  “Delicious,” said Charles. “Honestly, this tastes exactly the same.”

  Marnie clapped her hands together. “That’s what I wanted you to say. And, Jane? Do you like it?”

  “Well,” I said, “I’m not going to say that I prefer it to our carbonara, because that would be disloyal, but it is delicious.”

  Marnie smiled. “I knew you’d love it.” She refilled my wineglass. “We brought this bottle home,” she said. “I thought it was a bit mad—you know it’s never going to taste as good—but actually it’s traveled rather better than I thought it would. Don’t you think?” she asked.

  Charles nodded. “Definitely,” he replied. “Great pasta, wonderful wine. If it weren’t for the rain, I could almost believe we were still there.”

  This might sound strange—and perhaps you won’t believe me—but until that moment I’d never once felt like an unwelcome guest in their relationship. I’d been very aware of the two competing relationships. But I’d assumed that they could coexist, sort of side by side. And yet I was becoming more and more conscious that my friendship with Marnie felt like a paragraph in their story, that there was no space for anything other than that one love.

  The first few months after Jonathan died are shadowy; I can’t remember much of what I did or where I went or who I spoke to. But I eventually went back to work and Marnie invited me for dinner at the end of that first week. Charles worked late—often until after eleven, sometimes not returning to their apartment until the early hours of the morning—but he was determined never to work late on a Friday evening. He said that his weekends were sacred. It was all about balance, he said. But he was always exhausted by the time he returned home at eight, maybe nine o’clock at the end of the week. He never wanted to go out, or to see friends, or to do anything much. He just wanted to be at home. And so my weekly visits became a recurring thing, a pattern that continued and was rarely interrupted.

  But I felt that their marriage might mean the natural end of that routine. It had been one way for years, but I knew, better than most, that everything ends eventually.

  At half past ten, Marnie stood, and said, “Right.”

  I remained seated. She lifted our three dessert bowls from the table, stacking them in the corner of her arm, balanced against her inner elbow. She picked up the now empty fruit bowl, the jug of cream, and disappeared into the kitchen. We heard her switch on the radio, the sound of stringed instruments purring together, and the clink of ceramic dishes against one another. We listened to her footsteps, her socks padding against the floor as she moved from one side of the kitchen to the other, opening and closing the fridge, the dishwasher, the cupboards.

  I should have followed her, but I didn’t.

  “The wedding,” I said, and I don’t know why because I knew instinctively that it was a bad idea but once I had started I didn’t know how to stop.

  “Such a good day,” said Charles, yawning, stretching his hands above his head, just like he had done that evening, the exact same movement, his shirt once again straining against his belt. “Just the best.”

  “The end, though,” I said.

  “The end?” he repeated. “What about it?”

  He seemed genuinely bewildered.

  Now, very quickly, just one thing before I go on. And perhaps this should have been explained to you earlier. It is easy to forget since you have told very few lies in your lifetime. Whereas I have told a great many. So perhaps you can learn a little something from my experience.

  The first thing you must consider is that a lie is just a story. It is made up, a fiction. The second thing is that even the strangest fiction, the most ludicrous lies, can feel entirely true, entirely possible. We want to believe the story. The third is that believable lies are therefore no great feat. But the most important thing of all, something you must never forget, is that we are not immune to our own lies. We revise our stories, altering the emphasis, increasing the tension, exaggerating the drama. And eventually—after we have told this modified story a few times, improving it with each recital—we begin to believe it, too. Because we are revising not only our stories but also our memories. Our fictions—moments that we created, that we imagined—begin to feel real. You can see the situation unfolding, the revision as it might have happened, and you begin to question where the truth ends and the lie begins.

  “The end,” I repeated, and he shrugged his shoulders and furrowed his eyebrows. “The end of the evening. The end with you and me.”

  “You and me?” he asked. “Jane. Come on, really. What is this?”

  It was too late, you see. He had been granted the time to revise his recollection, to deliberately misremember that moment. There was no longer a single, solid truth. Had he replayed that story again and again? Had he altered his actions each time? Had he grown to believe his revised narrative, so that his incredulity, his confusion, would now seem authentic?

  I felt stupid, as though I was talking nonsense, and then I saw something, a shadow sliding down Charles’s face. His forehead wrinkled and then again was taut. His left eyebrow twitched, just once. His cheeks flushed pink, perhaps with embarrassment, perhaps with rage. He licked his lips, and then pressed them together between his teeth so that the edges faded to white. He made a brief, unintentional noise and bit at the corner of his lip.

  I was no longer sure of anything.

  “You know what I’m talking about,” I said.

  “I don’t think I do,” he replied. He placed both palms flat on the table, spreading his fingers.

  “You do,” I said. And I didn’t know if he did, but I really thought that he might.

  “I’m sorry, Jane,” he said, and his face was stone, his features solid, entirely untouched. “I’m afraid I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “You don’t?” I asked, hoping still that he might make a mistake and expose a truth.

  “What do you mean?” he asked, and he tilted his head to the left slightly, as though he really was curious, as though he really was bewildered by my question.

  “I think—” But I didn’t know what I thought. “You touched me,” I said instead. “Do you remember that? You were drunk but . . . you touched me.”

  He contorted his face into a portrait of shock. It felt false. His brows were too high on his forehead, his eyes too wide, his jaw dropping his lips into a sham little O.

  “Jane,” he said. “What do you mean, touched? You’re not suggesting—”

  “You remember,” I said. “I
know that you do.”

  He softened his face, adopting a strange look of concern.

  “Jane, I’m sorry, and I really don’t want to be rude, but I don’t know what you’re talking about at all. I want to help . . . and I’d hate for you to think— Why don’t you start at the beginning?” he said. “Tell me what it is that you think has happened.”

  “At the end,” I said. “When we were sitting down.”

  Something felt different; something felt wrong.

  “Go on,” he said.

  “You put your arm around my shoulder,” I said.

  I could tell that it was dark outside because the red curtains looked black against the pale walls. The candles were fading, flickering on metal seats.

  “I mean, if I’m being completely up-front with you,” he began, “then I have to say that I don’t remember that. But I suppose, yes, I’m not surprised by it. I think I hugged almost everyone there at some point throughout the day. It was a party, a celebration. And I . . . Is that it, Jane? My arm around you? Is that what’s made you so uncomfortable? Because I wouldn’t have thought . . . But if it did . . . I really didn’t mean to cause any offense.”

  “No,” I said. “No, that’s not it, not at all. Not your arm around my shoulder. That’s not what I’m talking about. Your hand,” I said. “You were touching me.”

  And then I noticed that he wasn’t quite looking at me anymore. He was instead looking over my head, beyond where I was sitting, to something—someone—behind me. And I realized that the radio wasn’t on and that I couldn’t hear Marnie’s feet padding against the kitchen floor or the clinking of china or the seal of the fridge unsticking and then sucking itself closed. All I could hear was the quiet hum of the dishwasher.

  I had no way to know how long Marnie had been standing there listening to our conversation; I didn’t know how much she had heard. But I was absolutely sure that Charles had been manipulating the interaction for her benefit, performing a version of it that he wanted her to see, rather than the equivalent, the truth, that might have played out had it been just him and me.