The Dead Lie Down: A Novel

by Sophie Hannah

  ‘But I like their work,’ I told him. ‘Why shouldn’t I be enthusiastic? Surely they’re happy to be praised, even by people who don’t end up buying their pictures.’

  Aidan shook his head. ‘Praise minus sales equals lies. That’s the equation in these people’s heads. Until you put your money where your mouth is, they won’t believe you however much you say you love their stuff.’

  After lunch—a quick sandwich in the foyer café—I came to a stall that had me mesmerised. The artist was a woman called Gloria Stetbay, who looked scarily elegant. I didn’t get a chance to talk to her; she was surrounded by a tight circle of people who didn’t seem keen to make room for one more. Stetbay’s work was mostly abstract, and made me realise that many of the other abstracts I’d seen were far from being the real thing. Stetbay’s pictures looked like multi-coloured sand dunes, ruched and textured; I could have been looking at the skins of strange, glowing planets. She did things with colour and surfaces that made everything I’d seen up to that point look anaemic.

  Aidan waved a flyer in front of my face. ‘You’re in good company,’ he said. ‘She’s got work in Charles Saatchi’s private collection.’ I didn’t give a monkey’s about Charles Saatchi. ‘Is this it?’ Aidan asked. ‘Have we found it?’

  ‘I can’t. The cheapest one’s two thousand pounds and it isn’t my favourite. I won’t tell you how much that is.’

  ‘I’ll buy you whatever you want,’ he said, surprised I didn’t know this without having to be told. ‘Which is your favourite?’

  ‘No. It’s too much.’

  ‘Nothing’s too much if it’s for you,’ he said solemnly. We were still standing inside Gloria Stetbay’s stall. Two American women next to us were talking about another art fair they’d been to that was much better attended on the first day. ‘London isn’t what it used to be,’ one said. ‘Even Frieze is starting to look like it’s trying too hard. And what is it with razor blades? Suddenly everyone’s covering their canvases with razor blades—is that supposed to be edgy?’

  ‘I didn’t know what it was like to have good feelings in me until I met you,’ Aidan said, not caring who heard. ‘I love the way you love art. I love the way you want to buy it, and keep buying it, not because of any bullshit about investment or profit or status but as a kind of good luck charm. You love it and you want it close to you, to ward off harm. It’s like magic for you, isn’t it?’

  I nodded. I’d never expressed it in that way to myself, but he was right.

  ‘That’s what you are for me,’ he said. ‘I was planning to wait until later to ask you, but I can’t. Will you marry me?’ I didn’t do what women are supposed to do, didn’t remain cool and elegant as I told him I’d think about it. I screamed and waved my arms in the air like an idiot. ‘Is that a yes?’ he asked, as if there could be any doubt. There was none—not in my mind, at any rate. Aidan looked worried, though. ‘Sure you don’t want to wait until tomorrow before saying yes?’ he asked. I knew what he meant: we’d come to London to have sex for the first time, among other things. This wasn’t the first clue I’d had that he was nervous about it.

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Nothing could change my mind.’

  ‘Don’t say that,’ he told me, looking even more anxious.

  He bought me the Gloria Stetbay piece I loved instead of an engagement ring. We never did get to Jane Fielder’s stall; instead, we wandered happily and aimlessly, arguing about the art we saw—what had substance and what was empty. When I remember that day—which I do, often—it appears in my mind separately from what happened next, as if one world closed down at some point on Thursday 13 December, and a new one opened up, a horrible, frightening one that I wanted no part of.

  I know the exact moment it happened: ten thirty at night. Aidan and I had been out for dinner at an Indian restaurant called Zamzana. We’d taken the Gloria Stetbay with us, leaned it against the wall so that we could admire it while we ate. Afterwards we went back to our hotel, the Drummond. At reception, Aidan stood back, left it to me to hand over a credit card so that an imprint could be taken, to sign the receptionist’s form in two different places. I was acutely aware of his presence behind me, of him listening intently to every word I said, every nuance of my voice, even though all I was talking about was wake-up calls and morning newspapers: ‘No thanks. Yes please, the Independent.’ Once we had our room key, I turned away from the desk to face him. He looked serious. Prepared. ‘Shall we have a drink before going up?’ I said. ‘I’m sure the bar’s still open.’

  He shook his head, and I felt like a coward. We’d put this off for too long, that was the problem. Now too much hinged on it being a success.

  In silence, we walked to the lift, took it up four floors. Thank goodness no one was in there with us; I don’t think I could have stood that. When the doors slid open with a ping, I decided to lead the way, following the arrows on the oval-shaped brass signs. I wanted Aidan to see that I was as bold as he was. I was doing fine until I had to unlock our room with one of those stupid keycards. The tiny square light kept flashing red, and I got flustered. After my third try failed, my fingers were so slippery I couldn’t even get the card out of the slot. Aidan took over. For him, the light flashed green. We were in.

  We stood beside the double bed, looking at each other. ‘So. What now?’ I said.

  Aidan shrugged. ‘I suppose we should touch or something.’ I ought to have found it absurd—perhaps laughter would have shattered the tension—but this was the first direct reference either of us had made to the four months of agonised, yearning celibacy that we’d endured. Aidan’s words were enough to pierce the invisible barrier between us. I ran to him and threw myself, hard, at his chest. It was a few seconds—a terrifying chasm that seemed to grow wider and wider—before I felt his arms close around me and I dared to breathe again. We kissed. For more than an hour we did nothing but kiss, standing beside the double bed, with the black hold-all containing our overnight things lying by our feet.

  Eventually our lips were throbbing, raw, and we had to stop. ‘How are you feeling?’ I asked Aidan.

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Better. You?’

  ‘Still scared.’ Inspired by his bluntness, I thought I’d try the direct approach too. ‘I’m not sure how we get from here to . . . the next stage.’

  ‘Neither am I,’ he said.

  ‘How do other couples do it?’ I was thinking: how did I used to do it, with other people? Seventeen others, before Aidan. At one time it had seemed easy. The first time Aidan took me out for dinner, we’d talked about our previous relationships. He told me there had been nothing serious for him, only ‘a lot of futile one-night stands—non-starters, each and every one’.

  ‘There are no other couples like us,’ he said now. ‘We’ve both known what we’ve got in common from day one, haven’t we? I saw it in your eyes, when I found you on my doorstep last summer. You saw it in my eyes too.’

  I nodded mutely. His new-found frankness was making me feel uncomfortable.

  ‘We’ve both been to Hell and managed to claw our way out. I’ve spent most of my life wanting nothing but to bury what I’ve been through—you seemed to need to do the same.’

  ‘Aidan, I can’t . . .’

  ‘We haven’t asked questions. We haven’t pushed it. I reckon we’ve respected each other’s privacy a bit too much.’

  His words turned me back into a coward and I didn’t care. ‘Don’t ask me,’ I whispered. ‘I can’t.’

  ‘It’s not going to work,’ he said. I heard despair in his voice, as if something had torn inside him. It frightened me. ‘We can’t make it work, not like this, not if we’re both determined to hide everything that matters.’

  ‘We love each other.’ My voice shook. ‘That’s what matters most, and we haven’t hidden that.’

  ‘You know what I mean. I know you’re scared. I’m not exactly feeling calm about it myself, but I think we need to tell each other.’ Aidan cleared his throat. ‘I’m willing if
you are.’

  It’ll be easy from now on. That’s what he said, once I’d agreed. Once I’d said I was willing. If he meant the sex, he was right. It felt natural from the start, has ever since: passionate, intense, binding. It has become our refuge, the safe, dark place we escape to when the glaring brightness of everything that’s wrong between us shines in our eyes until we feel we’re going blind. Ironic that the one thing we lacked has become the only thing that sustains us.

  In that hotel room, Aidan told me he’d killed someone years ago, a woman. As soon as he said her name, Mary Trelease, I felt a coldness clutch at my heart, a sense of something being off balance, in the wrong compartment.

  Straight away, I knew I’d heard the name before, though I was certain Aidan couldn’t have mentioned it to me until now. There was no way he’d have casually dropped the name of a woman he’d killed into one of our previous conversations. Could I be imagining it? I wondered. Briefly, I considered telepathy as a possibility. If Aidan had killed a woman called Mary Trelease, as he claimed, her name would be imprinted on his consciousness for ever; could it have passed from his mind into mine, without being spoken aloud? I dismissed the idea within seconds. Was Mary Trelease famous? Was that why I’d heard her name before? Not knowing was the worst thing, the inexplicability of it. I couldn’t know the name, and yet I did. I sat motionless on the bed, bathed in dread. I wanted to ask Aidan who Mary Trelease was, but we’d agreed not to ask questions, and all the ones that occurred to me sounded frivolous and flippant when I rehearsed them silently.

  Aidan was in a terrible state after he told me. I couldn’t look at him, but I could hear him. It sounded as if he was disintegrating, and all I could do was sit there with my hands clenched in my lap, staring at the floor. Aidan and extreme violence, life-threatening violence, did not go together. No, I thought. No. I pictured Him and Her, allowed myself to think of their names for the first time in years, and something flared in my mind as it never had before, making them real; it was as if I was in the hotel room with them instead of Aidan. The three seemed to merge, so that I couldn’t distinguish between them, and for a fleeting moment I hated them all equally.

  Aidan kept saying my name—‘Ruth? Ruth? Say something! Tell me you love me, Ruth, please!’—but I couldn’t answer. He reached out to touch me and I flicked his hand away. I sat like a prim statue on the edge of the bed, doing and saying nothing, though I wanted to scream and hit him and call him a murderer. Eventually he stopped trying to get a response from me, and deafening silence engulfed us. I’d rejected him when he most needed love from me, and we both knew it.

  That’s my biggest regret. Whatever Aidan has done or not done, I hate to think of how badly I let him down that night.

  But of course, he hasn’t done anything. I’m not the only one convinced of this; the police agree with me.

  I don’t know how long that awful silence lasted. All I know is, after a while, the horror-haze that had filled my head cleared. I remembered who Aidan was: the man I knew and loved. If he’d killed someone, it couldn’t have been murder. There had to be an acceptable explanation. I got up, put my arms round him, told him it didn’t matter—whatever he’d done, I still loved him. I would always love him. I hated myself for saying those words—‘it doesn’t matter’—about a woman’s life; I only said it to compensate for what I saw as my own treachery. How could I have felt hatred for him? How could I have believed him? Aidan wasn’t evil. I couldn’t imagine ever being able to think of him as a killer. He’s got it wrong, I thought. Even before I knew it wasn’t true, I didn’t believe it.

  We made love for hours and hours, delaying the moment when words would once again become necessary. The morning sky was already breaking up the darkness by the time we finally fell asleep early the next morning. I woke up to the sound of Aidan saying my name. I opened my eyes. He wasn’t smiling. ‘It’s midday,’ he said. ‘We’ve missed half the day.’ His eyes were dull and hard. I’d never seen him look so out of reach before, and it scared me.

  I said nothing as we got dressed. Aidan made it clear with his body language that he didn’t want to talk. He phoned reception and asked for a taxi to be ordered. I heard him say, ‘Straight away’ and ‘Alexandra Palace’.

  ‘We’re going back to the art fair?’ I said.

  ‘That’s why we came.’

  ‘We don’t have to go back,’ I told him. It was the last thing I wanted to do. I wanted us to be alone, not in a hall full of people and noise. ‘We could go home. Let’s go home.’

  ‘We’re going to Alexandra Palace,’ he said tonelessly, as if a machine were speaking from inside him.

  I knew then that something was badly wrong. I wanted to ask him what was the matter, but it would have sounded ridiculous. The night before, he’d confessed to a killing. That would be traumatic for anyone; today he had to live with the consequences. We both did. I wanted to ask who else knew about what he’d done. I’d only known him four months. He might have been in prison before I met him. Mainly I wanted to apologise for the way I’d frozen and shut him out when he’d first told me, but I was so afraid he wouldn’t forgive me that I didn’t dare.

  When a receptionist phoned the room to say that our taxi was outside, I asked Aidan about the Gloria Stetbay picture—did he think it would be safe in the room? ‘No idea,’ he said, as if he couldn’t have cared less. He pretended not to notice that I started crying.

  We arrived at the art fair and went through the motions, walking up and down the aisles. I looked at paintings without seeing them. Aidan didn’t even look. He kept his eyes straight ahead, glazed, and marched up and down as if he’d set himself a goal of a certain number of footsteps and was counting them off one by one.

  Eventually I grabbed his arm and said, ‘I can’t stand this any more. Why are we like this? Why aren’t we talking?’

  I saw him grit his teeth, as if he couldn’t bear my touch. Less than twelve hours ago we’d been having passionate sex. It made no sense. ‘I’ve already said too much,’ Aidan muttered, not looking at me. ‘I shouldn’t have told you. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Of course you should have told me.’ I made a mistake then. I said, ‘Was it an accident? Was it self-defence?’

  He let out a harsh, contemptuous laugh. ‘Which would you prefer? Accident or self-defence?’

  ‘I . . . I didn’t mean . . .’

  ‘What if it was neither? What if I murdered someone in cold blood, a defenceless woman?’

  I felt my face twist in pain. Defenceless. ‘You didn’t. You can’t have,’ I said faintly.

  ‘People change, Ruth. People become different people during the course of their lives. If you loved the person I am now, you’d forgive anything I’d done in the past, no matter how bad. I’d forgive you anything, anything at all. There’s no crime so terrible that I wouldn’t instantly forgive you for it. Obviously the feeling isn’t mutual.’

  He was breathing hard and fast in my face, waiting for my response. I said nothing. He kept using words that paralysed me like shots from a stun-gun, words that had been repeated endlessly in court seven years ago: a defenceless woman. Parcel tape over my mouth . . .

  By the time I recovered and realised I had said nothing, that I’d failed to respond, Aidan was walking away. ‘Wait!’ I shouted after him, but he’d turned a corner. I ran as fast as I could, trying to keep my eyes fixed on the point at which he’d disappeared from view, but by then I was hysterical, shaking, babbling nonsense to myself, convinced I’d driven him away for ever. There were too many corners, too many intersections between one row of stalls and another. Every junction looked the same as all the others. I looked down one aisle, then a second, then a third, but saw no sign of Aidan. In desperation, I asked some of the artists who were sitting in little white cubicles decorated with their own work. ‘Have you seen my boyfriend? He might have come down here a minute ago. He’s tall, wearing a black jacket with shiny patches on the shoulders.’ Nobody had seen him.

  I
ran and ran, up and down the aisles in both halls. Aidan wouldn’t have left without me. He couldn’t have. He would never abandon me like that. Completely by accident, I found myself at Jane Fielder’s stall, number 171. I didn’t ask the woman standing next to it if she was Jane Fielder, or tell her how much I liked her painting that I’d bought from the Spilling Gallery—finding Aidan was the only thing in my head. Anything , I thought. I’d forgive him anything. ‘Have you seen a man with dark hair, tall, wearing a black jacket with shiny patches here?’ I tapped my shoulders. The woman shook her head.

  ‘I saw him,’ a voice called out from across the aisle. ‘He walked past a minute ago. Like a sort of donkey jacket, is it?’

  I turned, saw a young woman. Hair dyed yellow, with black roots showing, a red patterned scarf wrapped round her head. Skinny legs, cerise fishnet tights over black sheer ones, heavy black boots to halfway up her calves. She was minding the stall opposite, sitting beside a large free-standing sign that said, ‘TiqTaq Gallery, London’.

  I ran over to her, nearly colliding with her chair and knocking her to the ground. I managed to stop myself just in time. ‘Which way did he—?’ I broke off as something caught my eye. I blinked, breathed. No. No. I backed away. This was some sort of hideous practical joke; it had to be.

  ‘Which way did he go?’ the young woman asked on my behalf, seeing I was having trouble getting the question out. ‘That way—towards the exit there. Are you okay?’

  I wasn’t. I had to get away, but felt too weak to move. I leaned against the partition that separated Jane Fielder’s stall from the one beside it, and stared at the TiqTaq Gallery’s space from across the aisle, rubbing my forehead with my left hand, pressing my fingers hard against my skin.

  ‘Careful, you’re leaning on a picture,’ said a voice behind me. I couldn’t speak, or shift my weight elsewhere. I couldn’t do anything except stare past the woman with the dyed blonde hair at the painting in a green-stained wood frame that was hanging behind her. It stood out from all the others. It would have even if I’d never seen it before; it was in a different league from everything else TiqTaq had to offer.