We arrived at my flat and Marnie went to change out of her dress and into my favorite pajamas.
“I didn’t know,” she said, coming back in and perching on a stool in front of the breakfast bar. “I didn’t know how bad it was. I didn’t know then, when you were feeling it, how bad it really is.”
“You did everything you could,” I said, pouring boiling water into two mugs. “And anyway—”
“I didn’t,” she said. “Thank you for saying that. But we both know that I didn’t.”
I placed a cup of milky tea on the counter in front of her. “Drink this,” I said. “It’ll help.”
She nodded and wrapped her hands around the warm ceramic mug.
I wondered—before Jonathan died—if a person who suffers a great loss inevitably became more compassionate. Now that I have experienced my own great tragedy, I feel quite sure that—if this is possible—the answer is both absolutely yes and definitely not. I have a greater capacity for compassion, but I am less empathetic. I understood almost intimately the burden of Marnie’s grief, but I felt very little sympathy toward Louise, with her pouting and her hysteria and her general nonsense.
And I suppose my sympathy slackened slightly for Marnie, too, when she compared our respective losses. I knew that she was experiencing a genuine, agonizing, devastating grief. But it is one thing to lose a husband who is good and kind and loving, and it is quite another to lose someone who was never good enough at all.
Chapter Twenty-Two
I want to tell you about the weeks after my husband died. They were without doubt the very worst of my life and the words to represent them feel achingly incompetent. There is no language sufficient for the tremors that shake through you in the aftermath of an incredible loss. There is the death itself, which is everywhere, all the time, in every memory and in every moment that you wish you were with them. But that is only one pillar of grief. In its entirety, it is much more than the loss of a person; it is the loss of a life.
In those first few months, I was grieving in a brutal, ruthless way for moments that hadn’t happened, for things that now never would. If over one shoulder were my memories of the past—how we met, our wedding, our honeymoon—then over the other were the memories we hadn’t yet made, the things we’d expected for our life together: the children we were going to have, and the houses we might live in, and the places we would travel. I was caught between a past that felt too full of feeling and a future that seemed bereft of it.
I was restless with the scale of it, unable to position myself within my own life, fighting within my own mind to find any kind of quiet. I couldn’t sit and remember him and mourn him. I couldn’t focus on any one moment, because there were too many things that felt insurmountable. I was flighty and erratic, and I struggle now to recount this in any accurate way, because I was barely there at all.
But those few weeks are important. In some ways, they are where this all began.
* * *
That night, just after he’d died, I went to the Vauxhall flat. I discovered things that weren’t mine in my old room: clothing folded on the chair in the corner, jeans that clearly belonged to a man, and three shirts on hangers. I climbed into Marnie’s bed instead.
I could taste salt on my cracked lips. My throat was dry, and my brain pulsed within my skull, the sockets of my eyes throbbing and pounding and jarring against my cheekbones. My face felt swollen, my skin too tight. I stared at the ceiling, the patterns of light cast by the blinds and the streetlamps outside, and I willed myself empty, my mind quiet, my body still. I tried to imagine myself somewhere else but there was nowhere to go, nowhere that he wasn’t.
I woke to the sound of voices in the hallway, then the key in the lock, laughter and footsteps against the plastic wood-effect flooring. I recognized Marnie’s giggle immediately, but the other voice belonged to a man, its pitch lower, resonating and vibrating within a broader chest.
They went into the kitchen. I could hear the steady hum of their conversation. Then the front door opened and closed again and the radio was turned on and I went into the kitchen and I saw Marnie bent over a cardboard box, folding bubble wrap around champagne flutes.
“That was quick,” she said, standing and turning around. “Oh,” she said. “What are you doing here? What’s wrong? Hey. What is it? What’s happened?”
Charles returned to the flat half an hour later. “I’ve got more boxes,” he called from the hallway. “Another six. Do you think that’ll be enough? I could have got more, but I wasn’t sure and I also wondered if—” He stopped in the doorway and simply said, “Oh.”
Marnie and I were wrapped together on the sofa. I don’t think I could have told you where one of us ended and the other began. My head was against her chest, her arm draped across my back, and our legs were tangled like tentacles.
That was the first time I saw him. He was smart and tall and handsome. He had broad shoulders and an ironed shirt, thin pink stripes against white, tucked into his jeans. His top button was undone and I could see the hairs of his chest reaching up toward the base of his neck. He had a strong jaw and a narrow nose and his eyebrows seemed almost black, his hair a very dark brown and salted at the sides by strands of gray.
“One minute,” she whispered into my hair and then she was gone. There were murmurs in the hallway and then the front door opened and closed again and then she returned.
I didn’t see him again for a while; I suppose I don’t remember leaving the flat for several weeks. But Marnie was keen that I got out, that I didn’t spend all day every day lying in the same filthy bedding, sweating and crying and torturing myself, and so she eventually started to send me on menial errands. She needed butter to bake a cake, more milk for her cereal, a notepad, please, from the corner shop just down the road.
I returned from the supermarket perhaps a month later and he was standing in the hallway of the flat, just about to leave. He was wearing a suit with a purple silk tie.
“Afternoon,” he said, holding open the door. “You must be Jane, right? Well, I must be going. Nice to meet you. And sorry—you know—about everything.”
He stepped around me and disappeared down the hallway.
I caught the front door seconds before it slammed shut.
He started appearing more regularly after that, popping by on weekday evenings, just to drop something off, a package that had been delivered to him, or to collect something—his stuff was everywhere: neat piles of jumpers and rows of his shoes and his watches lined up on the windowsill. Sometimes he stayed over. She had mentioned—a couple of months earlier, I think, when I was still living in Islington—that she was seeing somebody. But back then Marnie was always seeing somebody. She was always going on dates and sending me messages about new men and becoming instantly infatuated and then very quickly indifferent.
But soon he was with us more often than he wasn’t and one night I heard him and Marnie arguing in shouted whispers because they had their new apartment, dammit, he said, and when she’d suggested they buy somewhere together, he hadn’t envisaged living there alone and how long was this going to last, really, what was the plan?
That was the first time I felt anything other than indifference toward Charles.
His presence up until that point had barely registered. I had noticed him in the apartment, of course, but I was broadly oblivious to everything other than my grief.
But that moment changed things; it changed everything. It lit a fire within me. Suddenly, I had a hatred that overwhelmed my grief. The anger felt fresh and exciting: I felt powerful and charged in a way that I hadn’t for weeks. I couldn’t believe that a man—an adult man—could be so terribly insensitive. I couldn’t believe that he would make his living arrangements a priority over my grief, over my dead husband. I couldn’t believe that I had existed on the periphery of such a horrible, desperate man for so many weeks and hadn’t realized it.
I thought I knew what was going to happen. Marnie was going to say all the things that I was thinking: that he was selfish and egotistical and that unless he changed his attitude then they wouldn’t be living together ever thank you very much and how could he possibly—seriously?—ask her to put him first when we had been friends for years—years—did he not realize what an impossible ask that was?
I pictured us laughing about it later that evening. My anger would have been quickly quashed, but the storm of it would have reignited something within me. It would have been refreshing, a palate cleanser, to experience something other than exhaustion and sadness and panic.
Except that wasn’t how the conversation unfolded. I heard her murmuring, not shouting—not really angry at all—and quiet but not quite quiet enough.
“I know,” she said. “I know. And I want to live with you, too. You know that I do. This isn’t what I’d planned, either.”
The following evening Marnie cooked me dinner. She explained that on the night my husband died she had been helping her new boyfriend pack up his flat. And the following morning, they’d started to sort out this one. She acknowledged they hadn’t been together for long, but she had seen how happy Jonathan and I had been, and that had started quickly, hadn’t it? They had put an offer in on a place on the other side of town. It had only been a few months but when you know you know; that’s what she said. And it was on a whim; they’d seen the flat from the outside when they’d walked past and the real estate agent was there—he’d just shown another couple around the building—and so they went inside, and they didn’t think their offer would be accepted—it was low; too low, really—but it was and everything happened so quickly after that. She’d been planning to call me to share the good news. She’d wanted to invite us to dinner, to be their very first guests. It was a lovely flat. Or at least it would be eventually. I’d like it, she said.
Things had been put on hold—of course they had; she wouldn’t have had it any other way—because of everything that had happened. But it was time to start thinking about the next steps for both of us. She was struggling, she said, to pay both the rent on the flat and her share of the mortgage on the new place and, anyway, it was right for her to be thinking about moving in there; there was so much work to do and nothing was getting done. Perhaps I was interested in taking over the lease here? But maybe not—and that was fine, too—she’d help me find somewhere new if that was what I wanted instead.
I suppose I had known that she would fall in love at some point and want to leave the flat. But I felt shocked. I hadn’t believed that it would happen so soon. And certainly not like that.
I left the flat that afternoon and I went to stay with Emma. But her strange world was too strange for me: the empty fridge, the odd rules. And so I rented my own flat: my first time living alone. The building had been constructed a decade earlier, and each flat was a perfect square: a bedroom, bathroom, and living space Tetrised into position. The previous occupant had been permitted to paint the walls: a dark blue in the bedroom, orange in the bathroom, and a yellow wall behind the sofa. The flat was in a good location and it was affordable and it was entirely inoffensive. But I hated being there. I wanted to be with Marnie. And so I cursed Charles constantly. I blamed him for everything—my loneliness, my sadness, my grief—partly because I could and partly because, frankly, I thought then and still think now that he was really, truly guilty of a great wrongdoing.
If I had known then what I know now—that very soon my life would exist again without him in it—would I have hated him quite so much? Would I have found comfort in the knowledge that the scales do balance themselves eventually?
I might have found things to thank him for. It is true, I suppose, that he forced me to find my feet again. I hadn’t worked for nearly two months and his selfishness pushed me to find a strength that I thought I’d lost. I hadn’t spent a night on my own in years—most of my life, in fact—and yet he took my companion and forced me out. My champions, my cheerleaders, my counselors were gone. There was no one to look after me, no one whose love was absolute and unreserved, no one to whom I was central. Not without Jonathan. And certainly not without Marnie.
Chapter Twenty-Three
I would later learn that the mysterious woman from the funeral was called Valerie Sands. She was thirty-two years old, divorced, and a journalist. She had been working for the local paper for a decade while simultaneously running her own, often libelous, website and she was determined to find a real story, something powerful, something true—something that could change her reputation.
LESBIAN LOVERS KILL THEIR HUSBANDS
That was the headline she chose. She used capital letters and dark red type, like blood inked against the white background of her blog. We didn’t know it was happening—that it was going to be published online, that she was even investigating us—until it had already happened. We discovered the post about two weeks after the funeral, when “fine” was finally feeling like something that one day, someday, might again be possible for Marnie. Things had been easing, the weight of the grief spreading, yes, but thinning, too, like syrup diluted, and we had laughed once or twice. I had been flitting between absolute calm, because there was no way to identify my involvement, and palpating panic, because what if there was? And yet, as the first weeks became the funeral week, and the subsequent weeks elapsed, I felt more measured in general and the panic peaked only intermittently.
There hadn’t been many questions—a few at first, but nothing significant—and everyone had accepted the most obvious version of events as synonymous with the truth. Charles had been suffering with a migraine and, dizzy and confused, had tumbled down the stairs, breaking his neck as he landed and dying almost immediately. And Charles did have a migraine that morning; Marnie had confirmed it in the presence of the paramedics. And Charles’s migraines were often characterized by light-headedness, fuzzy vision, and occasionally vertigo, too.
The questions that everyone was asking—her friends and family, acquaintances, those who didn’t know us at all but were simply shocked—were more questions of faith than questions of fact. How could a young man fall to his death in such a violent way? What did he feel as he fell? What were the chances? Weren’t there many other ways in which he might have fallen, a million other stumbles that he might have survived?
But I knew that the questions of fact were inevitable, and the initial answers that came from the autopsy thankfully supported all the theories. The postmortem revealed that he’d eaten very little that day: some coffee and a few tablets—in quantities slightly higher than prescribed—for his recurring vertiginous migraines. He was obviously badly injured—the broken ankle, the dislocated shoulder—but it was the peg fracture at the back of his neck that proved fatal. He was very bruised, too, and it transpired that his cheekbone was fractured, they assumed from a knock on the way down. But they found nothing suspicious, so they stitched him up and ferried him to the funeral home and they all concluded that it was just a very unfortunate accident and very sad indeed.
If anything, I became less afraid. I wasn’t thinking about the police or a prison or the truth. Because none of the authorities—not the paramedics or the pathologist—were in any way imaginative. Isn’t that curious? I mean, I shouldn’t argue. But it wasn’t until later, after the funeral, after that article, that the fear began to simmer within me again. Because here was someone who seemed determined to interrogate the facts, who asked questions, who saw something darker blossoming in the account of this death.
Valerie had been looking for a story to alter the trajectory of her career. I don’t imagine she disliked writing for the local newspaper initially, but she had been working there too long, a decade, and she was always assigned menial community events—dog shows and charity bake sales and occasionally stints tracking down celebrities at fancy waiting-list restaurants. I suppose she wanted something more. She must have been delighte
d when her story walked through the front door one evening and sat down on the sofa beside her.
Valerie had been living with her roommate, Joanna, for three years. She’d left her husband at a train station after years of not unhappiness exactly but simply emptiness. She’d found a room to rent and the two women had quickly become friends. Joanna was training to be a paramedic and Valerie loved to be regaled with stories of life and death and gore: the most extreme moments of a human life.
Joanna might have said that she’d spent the day with a crew of two men, one who was older and rather overweight, and another who was younger. They’d been to an accident at a posh block of flats—I imagine this was how she described it; it’s what I’d have said—in which a young man had fallen down the stairs and his wife and her best friend had arrived to a twisted body sprawled in the hallway. And there was something strange, she might have said, about these two young women.
Valerie was intrigued.
She took her curiosity and tried to convert her suspicions into a story. Because she knew that if this was going to transform her career, then she needed to find some answers, to ask the right questions of the right people, and unearth all the nasty details and the gritty truths.
At first, she found nothing. She attended the funeral and noticed nothing untoward. She initiated a conversation with Charles’s secretary and Debbie unwittingly confirmed that he did indeed suffer with migraines. She loitered at the front of Marnie’s building—Jeremy spotted her on the CCTV—but Marnie wasn’t living there then and there was nothing much for her to find. The most obvious truth was still the most probable truth.
I suppose it was when she had finished examining Marnie that she started to look a little more closely at me. I saw her once at the front desk of my office building, chatting with the security guard manning the reception area. He was an older man, balding with a paunch, and she was so much younger and taller with her short hair and sharp cheekbones. I remember her leaning over the countertop, her low-cut sweater gaping as she laughed excessively. Her mouth was stretched wide to reveal straight white teeth, and I recall wondering what it was that she wanted from him.
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