Exquisite

by Sarah Stovell

  Alice would never change her name, either. I was certain of that. Independent, feminist Alice.

  It had been a relief for a few days, knowing she was out of my life, now. I hadn’t been able to forget about her when every day the emails were flooding in, declaring love, declaring sacrifice (she’d have given up on children, for me), declaring that she was there, she would wait, she would wait as long as I needed, as long as it took.

  God, it was exhausting, to be loved like that.

  I turned off the food processor and left the dough to prove.

  A week had passed since I’d been to the police. A week without Alice. An empty inbox, no notification on Facebook, where I’d had her marked as a best friend so I’d never miss her posts. The message would come in: ‘Alice Dark updated her status’, and I would hurry to read it, because always it would be something that lifted my day. After she’d left Jake, she’d written, ‘I am celebrating a night alone with a tub of Häagen-Dazs. I ate some, recalled with a shudder the days when I’d have been expected to perform an erotic task with it, then with deep joy ate the rest.’ I would never dream of saying something like that, but I couldn’t help admiring the boldness of the person that did.

  But there was nothing now. Just silence. My emails were all boring, my Facebook news lacked life.

  After the incident with the police, I’d spent two afternoons hanging around the village near her flat, waiting for a glimpse of her, just to make sure she was still alive. I was almost certain that she’d still be there. For a start, she had no money to go anywhere else, but she’d also be devastated, and most likely too devastated to make any sort of decision.

  I hadn’t seen any sign of her. There’d been no movement of curtains, no flitting of shadows near the window, nothing at all. I thought, Alice could be dead in there.

  The idea kept scratching at my mind. That Alice might kill herself had first occurred to me when I was typing my statement to the police. The girl was so troubled, I wondered if this would drive her over the edge – all the grief and confusion. Confusion like this could kill. I’d learnt that much from Christian.

  ‘My son was fine before you got your claws into him. He wasn’t ill. He’s never been ill. Never been depressed or unstable. You are a manipulator. You drove him to this. You know it as well as I do, and I hope you can live with it.’

  No one had believed Lucy Winter. The police pitied her. They pitied me as well. It was chaos. A dreadful, tragic mess that my family and I now had to live with.

  I passed the rest of the morning with housework and making a few notes for my next chapter, then baked the baguettes at the bottom of the Aga. When they were done, I lined a basket with a red tea cloth and packed six of them into it with some brie and grapes, and two slices of ginger cake.

  Once, when Alice had been staying here and the girls were in bed, we’d spent the evening on the terrace, eating brie-and-grape baguettes and ginger cake while the sun set and the air filled with the scent of lilies, and the sky burned orange over the mountains all around them. Later, when it was dark, we’d made love right there on the grass, and both said we’d never been this happy, never loved anyone this much…

  I put on my duffel coat, hung the basket over my arm and stepped outside. The air was cool and sharp, the sky heavy with wintering cloud. The afternoon lay grey as a secret.

  I walked quickly down to the valley and into the village, where tourists still thronged the streets and the churchyard.

  When I reached Alice’s flat, I stood outside for ten minutes or so, watching. There were still no signs of life in there. I carried my basket up the steps and put it gently down in front of the door.

  I didn’t need to leave a note. Alice would know.

  Then I walked away to collect the girls from school.

  3

  Alice

  I had barely left the studio in the week since it happened. There was no one to see in Grasmere and nothing to do unless I wanted to walk the fells; and although Bo had told me time after time that nature could heal me, I had no strength for it. I simply lay on my back in bed, taking long, deep breaths and rubbing my fist over my chest to try and ease the ache beneath my skin. I needed all my energy just to stay alive.

  My heart and mind felt beaten. Bo had ransacked them and kept the spoils for herself, like some parasite feeding on the shreds of my wellness, energised by my unravelling.

  I was falling apart. I’d never known there was truth in that sort of expression before, but now I understood: People broke, and I was breaking. And it was as real and physical as shattering a limb.

  If I’d had the strength to step outside myself and think about it, I would probably have been troubled by my reaction. Until now, I’d imagined myself charging through life, cool and indestructible. There was so much awfulness behind me and I’d survived it all – not just survived it but triumphed over it, squashed those traumas in my fists and said, ‘Fuck you.’ Until this happened, if I’d been honest, I’d have said I didn’t really believe in mental sickness, only a lazy weakness of the mind.

  But now I was here, barely able to move or think, barely able to do anything at all but fight to stay upright as surge after surge of wild emotion knocked into me. I had no idea how to stop it. For a while, I smoked and drank and slept through it, but the sleep was filled with images of Bo and the police, and when I woke, my mouth was a desert, my head bruised, my stomach swaying with booze.

  Once, I woke up and thought, If I stay here, I will die. And it was like a glimpse of the future; I saw it with ice-clear certainty.

  But there was nowhere to go, and I had barely any money. For the first time since I was a child, I longed for my mother.

  My mother.

  She wrote to me, in those sick years after she realised what she’d done. Plaintive, apologetic letters that I read and discarded. There was no way to mend that rift. It was huge and permanent. My mother could do nothing to make up for the memories I had to haul around for the rest of life, the weight of them pushing me down, making me stumble, my face in the dirt.

  ‘Put it right,’ she’d said with her dying breath, as if doing so was easy, as if finding a good man and having a couple of babies and giving them beautiful, ordinary lives were nothing more than decisions I had to make. I had made the decision long ago. A family, real and intact, was all I wanted, but it floated in the distance, as far off as a moon; sometimes it nudged its way out of the dark, slowly swelling so at times it appeared full and bright before me, within my grasp; but before I could grab it, it faded again, and everything around me went black.

  ‘Put it right.’

  ‘Well, mother,’ I wanted to say, ‘I’ve been doing my best, but I can’t stop fucking it up.’

  I started a list of all the things I was really bad at.

  I began with holding down a job. I was awful at that. Awful at being bored, but mostly awful at serving other people. I hated sitting at a desk in front of a screen full of spreadsheets while all that expensive Russell Group education slowly dissolved from my mind until those years spent slogging for it – slaving away to understand literary theory and long sections of untranslatable Chaucer – wasted away, because now I was here, in a world where my capacity for critical thought counted for nothing, and all that mattered was my capacity to bring in money that would never be mine but would go to some fat, arrogant man who cracked the whip and voted Tory.

  I was also a terrible cook. I’d once invited people over for dinner, handed them bowls of crisps and nuts when they came through the door, then taken myself into the kitchen, where I’d ploughed my way through a bottle of wine as I cooked, and had ended up so pissed that I had gone back to the living room, taken a seat among my hungry guests and said, ‘I’m sorry. I’m too pissed. Can we just eat crisps instead?’ They had all rallied round and ordered a pizza from Domino’s, which we happily ate out of the box; then we’d stayed up till 3 am, smoking weed and drinking and agreeing that we just weren’t the sort of people to mana
ge a civilised dinner party, despite our combined age now being more than 147. No one had seemed to hold my failure against me, but I never attempted to host anything after that, not even a Waitrose ready meal for two.

  I was terrible at staying sober and not smoking thirty a day. In fact, I was terrible at doing those things that wouldn’t kill me, like exercise and healthy eating and drinking water. I couldn’t open a bottle of wine without finishing it and then, usually, moving on to the next one. I couldn’t go to a party without waking up the next morning beside someone I didn’t know.

  Relationships. I was dreadful at them. Appalling. Worse than anyone I knew. I’d spent the first twenty-three years of my life staying away from everybody, but now I was twenty-five and had behind me a long list of disastrous encounters with men who were still in love with their exes, or still in love with the one they were cheating on, or just fundamentally not in love with me. One of them had been so not in love with me that he’d battered me, and I hadn’t left. I’d stayed with him, like some tired cliché of a desperate woman. When I did finally get myself together and walk away, it was meant to be my turning point. After him, I was going to get involved only with good men. My mother’s words had haunted me. ‘Put it right.’ I would put it right. I would.

  Then I had met Jake. And he was a good man. OK, it hadn’t worked, but he had been a step in the right direction towards that dangling moon of emotional fulfilment.

  And then there was Bo. I had never imagined someone like her would come along and set me back like this.

  Bloody Bo. Bo who understood me, Bo who knew exactly what she was doing when she said those vicious things, when she stamped on me in all my most vulnerable spots, when she wrote that statement to the police and betrayed me so hard it was like being eleven and living through my mother’s violence again. The worst thing of all was that Bo knew; she knew exactly what that betrayal would be doing to me.

  I wondered how much of it she’d planned. Had this all just been a game to her? Making me fall in love; saying she’d written stories especially for me because she loved me; telling me to write to her publicist – was it all just a cool, calculated step towards destroying me?

  I shook my head. I supposed I would never know.

  Bo. Bloody Bo, who’d seemed so lovely, so stunningly lovely, but was in fact calculating and wicked, playing games with my mind and feelings.

  So now I was here, alone in my flat, pissed, hungry and falling apart.

  I needed to do something. My MA started in a week, but I didn’t want to go to Lancaster anymore. If I were to have any chance of getting over this, I needed to be away from all reminders of Bo. I decided to phone Sussex, ask if they’d take me last minute, even though I’d turned them down before. I could be back in Brighton for the start of term…

  But I had no money. I’d squandered the fees on … on this. On Bo. I would need a loan, now, and I’d need to beg my boss at the language school to take me back. He probably would. But I was so far away, here in Grasmere. Brighton now seemed like another world, a place where I’d been young; a time that was Before Bo. I knew now that Bo was the hinge that would divide my life. There would be the old me from Before Bo, and the new me – the one who would emerge from the chaos of After Bo.

  There was so much to work out if I was going to make it back to Brighton, damaged and afraid. So much to organise if I was to even consider moving my MA course. I looked at my laptop, unopened on the table in the middle of the room. I wasn’t sure I even had the energy in me now to write a book. Unless I wrote a book about Bo. That, I supposed, would be something into which I could channel my anger and all this wretched, wretched grief.

  For now, though, I needed another drink. I’d woken up this morning with every intention to make it through twenty-four hours on nothing but brown bread and water, but it was now half past six and my resolve had failed. Being alone with my endlessly spinning thoughts frightened me. I needed to knock myself out. I looked in the fridge. There were only two beers left; they wouldn’t do it.

  I slung on my coat and picked up my purse from the floor. I was going to keep buying booze and fags until the money ran out and my Visa card was declined, and then I would just rot away.

  I opened the front door.

  On the top step were a bunch of lilies and a wicker basket covered in a gingham cloth – the kind carried by Little Red Riding Hood through the forest. Puzzled, I looked inside. Six mini baguettes, a bunch of grapes wrapped in kitchen roll, a triangular slab of brie and some cake, which I knew immediately was Bo’s own, sticky with lemon icing and knobbled on the inside with crystallised pieces of ginger.

  What did this mean? What the fuck was it? An apology? An expression of regret? Or was it love?

  My mind started spinning again, out of control. I went over every possibility, trying to settle on a meaning that made sense. I wanted to believe it was love. I wanted to believe it was an apology and that Bo would turn up tomorrow in person, say she was sorry and ask me to forgive her. And I would. I would take her back in an instant, even though I shouldn’t, even though all Bo deserved at this moment was hatred and contempt and then a gradual movement by me towards feeling nothing at all. But God, that would be so slow; it would take years, I knew that; years and years before I could hear Bo’s name without anger or pain.

  I left the basket and the flowers on the step and walked on to the off licence, where I bought twenty Mayfair and a four-pack of Stella. When I got home, they were still there, so I picked them up, took them inside, put the lilies in a glass and ate one of the baguettes filled with brie and grapes. The taste of it opened my memory, and took me straight back to that night in Bo’s garden, when we’d sat for hours talking and eating, and watching the orange sunset smash over the fells like something holy, and I had felt the strength of this love overwhelm me, and wept with it.

  I was always weeping now. Weeping, or howling.

  I finished what I was eating and thought, Bo knows. She knew exactly what she was doing when she dropped that basket off, exactly the effect it would have on me. And I had no idea what her motives were. Perhaps she was trying to summon the courage to come up and talk to me. Or perhaps she was plotting poison. But the effects of Bo’s poison were so unpredictable, I had no way to protect myself. I certainly couldn’t go to the police. They’d never take me seriously. Bo had gagged me.

  But then another thought occurred: Surely this offering she’d left couldn’t be nasty. It had to be love. Because if it wasn’t love, then Bo wasn’t the beautiful, beautiful woman I had known; instead she was cruel. Nothing more than a wild cat, scratching its claws on my mind.

  4

  Bo

  I was always thinking about the baby. Every day for twenty-five years, that red, screwed-up face had been in my mind. I followed her growth in other children, and in my own. Now and then, when we were visiting my parents on the caravan site in Woodstock, I would study them from where I sat, trying to piece together the child from their features. Would she have these eyes, those ears, that neat, white chin? I found my family inescapable. The genes were too strong, passed down whether I wanted them or not. I tried to turn away and reject them, but every time I looked in the mirror, they were there: my mother’s eyes, my father’s forehead, my brother’s nose – all making my face a grotesque genetic mockery.

  I thought I’d recognise the baby, if I ever saw her again. And then what would I do? Would I sit her down and tell her the story, hand her the pith of her pale beginnings? Would I apologise for giving her up? Or would I sit back, serene and unknowable as an angel, and say I was glad she’d had a good life and I knew her parents were wonderful?

  Alice wasn’t the baby. I knew that. Alice was someone else. But, unmothered and abandoned, she carried all the hallmarks of my lost baby; in her I had found the image of that child, of Willow, and because of that I had loved her sublimely, recklessly, dangerously. And now, as a result, everything was chaos. I’d made a criminal of Alice, but for what? To sile
nce her. To stop the world from finding out that there was something inside me that kept on surfacing, a cruelty so ruthless it could slice out hearts.

  My home, my daughters, my husband, my success … There were days when it felt they amounted to nothing more than camouflage.

  I leaned my head on my desk. What I’d wanted was to sweep Alice away, but she was still here, in my head, under my skin, everywhere. Alice was everywhere.

  Sometimes, I wanted her to die. I thought it was the only way to get her out of me.

  I picked up the mobile phone on my desk and rang my mother. The call failed. The signal on her caravan site was haphazard, and my mother only checked her messages when she had credit on her phone to hear them, which wasn’t often. I pulled some paper out of a drawer and wrote her a letter instead. Email was beyond my mother. The internet was off her radar.

  Mum,

  I was thinking of coming down for a visit sometime next month. I have to meet with my agent in London, so could drop in for a cup of tea if you’re around. How does 13th November sound to you? There are some things I would like to talk about. Do you remember the baby I had when I was fifteen? I wondered if you knew what had happened to her? I would like to trace her, if I can.

  Bo.

  I always ended my letters to my mother like that. Just Bo. Love was not a word I put anywhere near my family. It wasn’t a word we knew, or understood. Lovelessness was genetic, I thought. Handed down the generations like cancer or madness.