by Rebecca Done
Or maybe I would go one better and buy her a ring.
The thought made my stomach skip.
26
‘Tired?’ Anna asked Jess from the opposite side of Jess’s kitchen table. Dressed in a pale blue vest top and white yoga pants, Anna was cradling a cup of raspberry leaf tea – looking about as alert herself, Jess thought, as someone who’d just donated their adrenal glands to medical research.
‘No, I’m fine,’ Jess lied, thinking this all felt a bit like competitive wellbeing, before sipping from the takeaway coffee Anna had brought round and promptly burning her tongue. Anna herself seemed resolutely to be resisting the use of artificial stimulants and had even declined a slice of Jess’s home-made yoghurt cake, explaining that dairy facilitated inflammation in the gut and inhibited her ability to carry out one-legged king pigeon poses in particular.
Assuming the pigeon thing to be something Anna routinely did to cleanse her ovaries, Jess hadn’t pushed it any further. So she took an oversized bite from her own slab of sponge, and with the smooth, sugary tang that ensued, felt her exhaustion abate slightly.
‘How’s Charlotte?’ Anna asked.
Having not yet heard from Will, Jess had no idea if Charlotte was alive or dead. ‘I don’t know,’ she confessed. ‘Haven’t heard.’
Anna was massaging Smudge’s head in a repetitive circular motion like she was nervous about something. Her skin appeared to be in need of some heavy-duty moisturizer and her hair looked as if it hadn’t seen shampoo for a while. She was also thinner than ever, which had the effect of making her nose and ears seem somehow too big for her head. Though Jess could hardly claim to be an expert, angles and bones just didn’t seem compatible with falling pregnant, which worried her.
‘Are you okay?’ she asked, to which the correct answer, if she’d thought about it before she opened her mouth, was clearly no. Nothing had changed since yesterday: Anna was still not pregnant.
When Anna failed to either look up or offer a verbal response, Jess attempted to de-awkward the pause by filling it with the sound of low-level coffee slurping and cake consumption. It worked only to the extent that it muffled the ticking of the clock. Anna wasn’t normally one for long silences, which made it slightly unsettling to experience her resolutely going the distance on one.
‘Anna?’ Jess eventually prodded her beneath the table with her foot, surprised to notice just how little flesh jiggled on Anna’s calf as she did so. Her leg felt more like the bony arm of an elderly woman.
Finally, Anna looked up and met her eye. ‘Okay.’ She exhaled stiffly. ‘Yesterday, after … I realized I wasn’t pregnant, Rasleen and I had a heart-to-heart.’
‘About?’ Jess said, and for some reason she got the feeling that Anna was about to say, ‘you’.
‘You.’
Jess felt her stomach turn over like someone had reached in there and physically flipped it. Being assessed in absentia by Rasleen felt like being probed without permission, needlessly violated, and the thought of Anna colluding with it brought a shock of indignation to her throat.
‘Rasleen thinks there’s something stopping me conceiving.’
This was nothing new, which could only mean that Anna was throwing it into the mix as part of a wider circuitous preamble to something more significant.
‘Yoga for fertility is all focused around truth and honesty, Jess.’ Looking up, she registered Jess’s cool expression, which seemed straight away to put her off maintaining eye contact. ‘Look, I’ve been holding something in, keeping something from you. Anyway, Rasleen thinks it could be at the root of why I can’t get pregnant. Who knows if it is? But she asked me to come and talk to you today.’
Anna was speaking like a mediator arriving on-site at a high hedge dispute, as if she had all the pertinent facts stowed away in her leather holdall and she just needed Jess to comply with whatever it was she was about to propose.
But then her face tightened slightly, and Jess was suddenly hit with the uncomfortable feeling that she wasn’t going to like what was coming next.
There was a drawn-out pause, punctuated only by Smudge’s deep breathing and the gentle howl of a wind gust trapped inside the Aga pipe.
‘It was me,’ Anna said then. ‘I called the police, in 1994. I reported you and Matthew first thing on the Monday morning. It wasn’t Miss Laird, it was me. I made the phone call.’
Jess laughed. ‘Don’t be stupid, Anna.’
Anna looked at her, and both girls knew this was her last opportunity to take it back and say she was joking. She shook her head. ‘I’m not.’
Silence. Jess began to feel the truth sinking in like the sharp kick of a well-placed foot in the pit of her stomach. ‘What?’
‘I knew about you and Mr Landley from the start. I knew you were having an affair.’
‘Hold on. You called the police? Not Miss Laird?’
‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘Anonymously. They never knew it was me.’ Pause. ‘I knew where you’d gone – I saw you take the key to the villa.’
Jess floundered. ‘You told the police where we were?’
‘I didn’t say exactly where. I just said … the Picos.’ Her words seemed to shrivel as she spoke. ‘I didn’t want you to suspect me.’
‘Oh.’ Jess’s eyes sprang with disbelieving tears. ‘Well, I definitely didn’t.’
Anna pressed her gaze to the floor.
‘Why would you do that?’ Jess’s voice was tiny now, like it had curled up with shock on being hit with something blunt.
‘I hated him,’ Anna said, though she sounded more defensive than apologetic. ‘You and me, Jess – we were like sisters before Matthew Landley came along. And then you ditched me for him, and you never even told me you were seeing him. He forced you to keep quiet and I hated him for that.’
‘But … I thought you were my friend.’ Jess half spoke half choked, parking for the moment Anna’s false assumption that Matthew had been some sort of one-man intimidation racket as opposed to her loving boyfriend. ‘And now you’re telling me … everything that happened was your fault?’
‘What happened wasn’t my fault,’ Anna replied, though the way that she said it was almost rehearsed, the result perhaps of drumming it into herself for the past seventeen years. ‘Matthew Landley brought it all on himself. You know that, Jess.’
Jess stared at her in disbelief. ‘If you hadn’t called the police, they would never have found us and everything would have been okay. Matthew wouldn’t have gone to jail. We might still be together. My mother might still be alive. And my … our …’ But unable to complete her sentence, she allowed the ragged fragment of it simply to hang, exposed and accusatory.
‘They’d have found you eventually,’ Anna said, avoiding Jess’s eye. ‘You’re crazy if you think they wouldn’t have.’
Jess wasn’t too sure about that, given the Baxters’ little villa was high up in the Picos surrounded by nothing but Picos. They’d taken long enough with a cast-iron tip-off.
Seeming somehow to sense the change in atmosphere, Smudge got up from where he was sitting next to Anna and trotted over to plonk himself down at Jess’s feet instead. His fur felt warm against her skin, a tiny comfort as she struggled to grasp what Anna was telling her.
‘Matthew Landley changed you, Jess,’ Anna said now. ‘He turned you into a completely different person. You started lying to everyone. My mum treated you like a daughter, but you still came round to our house and stole the key to our villa. After everything she’d done for you, you risked implicating her in the whole fucking thing.’
‘We’ve been over this,’ Jess reminded her, because of course they had. She’d apologized to Christine numerous times in the wake of Matthew’s arrest. ‘I told the police your mum knew nothing about it. I told them that, straight away.’
There was a sharp pause.
‘Dangerous,’ Anna enunciated then. ‘Matthew was nothing short of dangerous. He deserved to go to prison.’
‘He wasn’t da
ngerous. Don’t be crazy.’
Anna’s whole face became a reproachful glare. ‘Well, he got you to drug me in Venice.’
‘What?’
‘I saw you crush diazepam into my drink. Do you remember, in the hotel room?’
‘That was my idea,’ Jess said quietly. ‘Not Matthew’s.’
‘I poured it straight back into the bottle while you were in the toilet,’ Anna continued, talking over her. ‘And then I pretended to pass out. But I followed you into the square, Jess, and I heard him asking you whether his little cocktail plan had worked. I heard him.’
There was no point in correcting what Anna had in fact misinterpreted, Jess could see that now, because her best friend was clearly no longer in the market for a two-way conversation.
‘Poor Miss Laird was trying to protect you on that trip. She knew what Mr Landley was like.’
‘Oh Jesus,’ Jess said, pressing an index finger against each temple. ‘Don’t poor Miss Laird her. The woman was completely insane, Anna. She’d been following us, taking pictures of us together. She broke into Matthew’s house and threatened him, remember?’
‘Don’t you think,’ Anna replied coolly, ‘that if there were photos, they’d have been handed over to the police?’
Jess fumbled in her mind for the fragments of half-information she’d been given. Matthew’s lawyer had never seen any photos, had said they’d probably been disregarded at the outset for reasons of quality or similar. She struggled to recall the phrase – inadmissible evidence.
‘There were never any photos, Jess – Sonia was calling his bluff.’ Anna’s voice sounded faintly derisive. ‘There was nothing on that camera. She suspected you both, but she didn’t know for sure.’
Jess remained very still. She felt as if her heart was stretched taut inside a catapult, ready to go ping at any second.
‘I was the one who was following you,’ Anna continued. ‘I knew all your hideouts, the places you went together. I saw you at the beach, by the harbour. I even sat in his back garden one night after dark. Someone had to find out what was going on. I knew Miss Laird couldn’t do it. She was too scared of Matthew clocking her and making things worse for herself. I mean, he’d already put her in plaster, for God’s sake – what else was he capable of?’
What?
Jess blinked and shook her head. ‘What?’
‘When Sonia broke her ankle.’
‘What about it?’
‘He pushed her off that step.’
‘No, he didn’t. Who told you that?’
‘Oh, come on. Everyone knows that’s what happened.’
‘No.’ Jess’s stomach clenched with indignation. ‘Everyone thought that’s what happened.’
But Anna was clearly not in the mood to pause and rewind. Instead she remained steadfastly focused, speaking in the hushed tones of someone delivering a witness account for true crime television, which was annoying enough for Jess to think that pixelating her face out and adding a bit of voice distortion might in fact have been quite satisfying.
‘Sonia went back to the police a few weeks after he did it, to make a formal complaint of assault. But they didn’t take her seriously. That’s why she was so reluctant to report you both – she was scared about the repercussions if she made accusations she couldn’t back up. She was terrified of Matthew. The way he treated her was … well, it was verging on sociopathic, Jess.’
Jess said nothing, mostly because this was now becoming bullshit that barely warranted breath. Matthew was about as sociopathic as a serial fundraiser doing sky dives for charity.
‘Her only option was to call his bluff, so she did,’ Anna declared. ‘She made him think she was going to report him, and he fell for it. Fled to Spain at the first sign of trouble, taking you with him. Implicated himself. I always did think he was spineless like that.’
Jess knew that Sonia hadn’t been scared of Matthew. It was far more likely that the only reason she’d not been the one to report them that Monday morning in 1994 was because she’d been beaten to it.
‘I felt so sorry for her,’ Anna said now. ‘She was only standing up for what she thought was right. It was her moral duty as a teacher.’
Jess paused, suddenly unsure how Anna had come to be so familiar with the inner workings of Miss Laird’s unique psychology. ‘Hang on … how do you know all this, Anna? About Sonia?’
A brief silence.
‘We kept in touch, afterwards.’ Anna’s eyes had opened very wide by now, the body language shorthand for being entirely beyond reproach. ‘We met up occasionally. I went to London sometimes, she came to stay at Beelings. I just thought she did a really brave thing, getting involved like she did. She was a good teacher. I felt sorry for her. It wasn’t just your life Matthew destroyed, Jess – there were other people affected too. Sonia ended up teaching at some shitty inner-city comprehensive in London because she was too traumatized to stay at Hadley. She was living in a bedsit. It was tragic.’
Jess recalled Matthew’s account of Sonia with her camera in his living room, and of the statement he said she’d given to the police when they were gathering their evidence. For Anna to reveal she had stayed in touch with Sonia after all that was no different to her saying she’d befriended the genius who’d lent her alcoholic mother a shotgun.
‘Sonia used to tell me what Mr Landley was really like, Jess. Did you know he used to mess her about when she was dating Darren? He’d lead her on and then reject her, ignore her at school whenever he wasn’t in the mood to flirt with her. I mean, come on – why do you think she was at his cottage that night in her underwear? Are you so naive, Jess? Mr Landley was a fucking snake.’
‘Matthew wasn’t a snake,’ Jess countered, a truth that felt about as basic to her as the need to breathe. ‘He was anything but.’
‘It was a gross abuse of his position.’
‘So says the law.’
‘Since when does the law not count?’
‘It does – it does count! Which is why I’m sitting here with you now, Anna, and Matthew’s round the corner with Natalie and Charlotte! The law worked – it did everything it was meant to do. You should be pleased about that!’
Anna failed to respond, and then neither of them said anything else for a very long time.
‘So now what?’ Jess asked Anna eventually. ‘Now you’ve dropped your little bombshell, you’re going to scuttle off back to Thornham to stand on your head and absolve yourself of all responsibility? How very karmic of you.’
Anna took a steadying breath. ‘Rasleen did warn me that you might reject my truth, Jess, but I’ve offered it to you. That’s all I can do.’
‘Well, I must say I appreciate having your truth shoved down my throat, Anna. Shame it’s made me feel like I want to throw up.’
Anna looked away from her and down into her cooling cup of raspberry leaf tea.
‘So what happens next? You fall pregnant?’ Jess clicked her fingers. ‘Just like that?’
‘Well,’ Anna said, seeming oddly surprised that Jess would be so heartless as to bring that into the equation, ‘of course I hope so.’
Jess swallowed back a glut of fierce tears. ‘Why didn’t you just do what most people do, Anna, and take some time out to relax instead? Book yourself a holiday somewhere hot? It might have had the same result in the end. But hey – what would I know?’
Anna waited for a couple of seconds. ‘But of course you would, Jess,’ she spat. ‘Of course you would fucking know. Who the fuck are we pretending for now?’ Suddenly animated, she swept an arm dramatically around the empty kitchen.
The meaning behind her words was so brutal, so unexpected, that it struck Jess almost physically – as if Anna had whipped out something sharp without warning and plunged it very deliberately into Jess’s gut.
Anna began to discharge accusations then, rapid-fire in quick succession like they were bullets. ‘It’s not fucking fair, Jess. Do you know how hard it is for me to go through this month after month �
� to look you in the eye and ignore the fucking great elephant in the corner of the room? You chose to throw away the one thing I want most in the world. So you tell me, Jess, how is that fair? TELL ME HOW THAT’S FAIR!’
She gasped for breath, her face pink and furious, clenched up with the outrage of injustice like a child in the grip of a violent and unstoppable tantrum.
Jess was so stunned by Anna’s outburst that she could barely form the words. ‘I think I stopped believing in fair a long time ago, Anna.’
After Matthew’s arrest, Jess had been taken straight to her aunt’s flat in Dalston, where the artfully minimal square footage would only serve to aggravate already-precarious relations between Jess and her aunt, mother and sister over the following thirteen months. The totalitarian regime they imposed on Jess in the wake of the scandal should really have been punishment enough – but then her secret was discovered by nosy Debbie when it was a mere five weeks old, only minutes after Jess had learned of it herself. Suspecting something was up, her sister had until that point been conducting a crude and unsubtle style of investigation that essentially amounted to bursting through the bathroom door whenever Jess was in there, and staring meaningfully at her stomach whenever she wasn’t. So in a way it had seemed inevitable that Debbie should clock the pregnancy test by the sink one night while Jess perched numbly on the toilet – upon which Debbie snatched it up and rushed breathlessly into the living room with it like she was carrying fistfuls of dynamite. Triumphant, she threw down the lit fuse of her sister’s pregnancy, complete with her spite-laced informant’s commentary, before making a hasty retreat to the kitchen to observe the ensuing explosion. The row was indeed so forceful that a neighbour ended up calling the police, upon which Jess was shooed outside to shiver and sob on the balcony wearing only a T-shirt while her mother and aunt assured the nice men from the Met that they’d both just had a bit too much to drink. The nice men from the Met stayed for exactly the length of time required to verify this – approximately twenty seconds – before legging it off up the Balls Pond Road without looking back.
