Читать книгу The Girl Before You - Nicola Rayner - Страница 16

Today Alice has been feeling, not bad exactly, but a bit strange, as though her body chemistry has shifted, realigned. How much did she drink last night? She’d shared half a bottle of Merlot with George, which wasn’t much by their standards, even these days. And they’d had a fairly early night. So what could it be?

Her colleague on the next desk slathers her arms with moisturiser as she trills on the phone. The smell, rich and musky, seems stronger than usual – Alice finds it oddly repellent. Bile rises from her stomach and she swallows hard.

She looks back at the screen. She had been thinking of Naomi, Ruth Walker’s sister, who had been in her year at St Anthony’s. She had been – still was – exceedingly pretty, with her huge dark eyes and olive skin. A history of art undergrad, she was gentler than her sister, less intimidating. Alice had liked her. They would bump into each other in the college bar and say, ‘We must have that coffee.’

But Alice had become busy with the full-time job of being George’s girlfriend and Naomi had fallen in with a different group, so the moment had passed. And later their gossipy exchanges became greetings and then nods, a raised hand across the quad. Alice suddenly felt sad. Had she been right to put all her eggs in one basket from the beginning, not to strike out on her own, to make George’s life hers?

A thought occurs to her. She logs into Facebook and types ‘Naomi Walker’ into the search engine. The right Naomi Walker appears straight away. She hasn’t changed her name. Alice can’t really remember Naomi with boyfriends at college. Maybe she’d just been picky. Facebook asks Alice if she wants to befriend Naomi and, before she has time to think about it, she puts the cursor over ‘Add Friend’ and clicks the mouse.

‘It’s the man of the moment.’ Alice is jolted back to the room.

‘I’m sorry?’ Alice definitely feels odd today.

‘Your hubby,’ says her colleague breathlessly.

George sometimes had this effect. And there he is, pacing towards her, with a wide smile and brandishing a bunch of sunflowers.

‘George?’ says Alice sharply. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’

‘I thought we could go out for lunch,’ says George, striding over and giving her shoulder a squeeze and her colleague a conspiratorial wink. ‘Can’t a chap surprise his wife from time to time?’

‘Well, yes, he can. But I think this is the first time you’ve been here since the Christmas party. In 2010.’ She adds mentally: where you drank too much and flirted outrageously with one of the interns.

‘What’s this?’ George gestures at her computer screen with the sunflowers.

‘Oh, nothing.’ Alice hastily minimises Naomi’s beaming face. ‘Did you say you were going to take me out to lunch?’ Her voice sounds unnaturally bright. ‘What a treat! Where are we going?’

The restaurant is packed. City workers flushed with lunchtime wine – sleeves pulled up, ties loosened – lean towards each other in privately bellowed conversations. It is too hot, too loud. By the time they’re seated, Alice has lost all enthusiasm for lunch; she doesn’t really want to be here at all.

‘Do you want wine, darling?’ George asks, reaching for the list.

‘Better not.’ Alice glances down at the menu. ‘I’m feeling a bit off today.’

Behind George, she notices a mother trying to nurse her baby. Even with a discreet napkin over her shoulder it’s an incongruous place to breast-feed. The woman’s face has the distracted, half-there expression of new motherhood.

‘Maybe you’re right.’ George drops the wine list as quickly as he picked it up. ‘Are you OK, darling?’ He is being peculiar. Oddly attentive and fidgety.

Alice frowns. ‘George, what’s going on?’

He sighs, brushes a hand across his face. ‘Look, I’ve got something to tell you.’

‘Oh.’

‘That girl you mentioned the other night?’

Before he says it, Alice has a sense of déjà vu: she knows, has always known, that this is the thing coming back for them.

‘I have a confession to make: I did know her. We had a sort of thing in my second year. Way before I met you.’

‘A thing?’ says Alice sharply.

‘Well, a fling thing. Yes.’

‘So you lied.’

He shakes his head, adamant. ‘No, not a lie. It wasn’t a lie.’

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘You said you didn’t really know her.’ She looks at his face, right at him.

George drops his gaze to the table. He picks up a knife and puts it down again.

‘It wasn’t important,’ he says quietly. ‘And I didn’t really know her.’

He had made her look stupid again. And in front of their friends. Teddy would have known. Teddy and George knew all of each other’s secrets from college.

‘How long were you together?’ She sounds shrill. The woman breast-feeding looks up. Alice lowers her voice. ‘Were you in love with her?’

George frowns. ‘A matter of weeks, really. No, it wasn’t serious. And it was a long time ago.’

Alice closes her eyes. He’s right, in a way. Why is she so worked up? But she imagines the looks exchanged between George and Teddy, the undercurrent of understanding. The feeling is like running her finger along an old scar – sensitive but not painful exactly.

‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’

‘I was embarrassed. I didn’t treat her very well and we fell out. And then, of course, when what happened happened …’ He trails off.

‘And what, George? You didn’t want to be associated with a missing person? A possible suicide. Because what? It might reflect badly on you?’

George looks at her. He is pulling his honest face, one he does particularly well for the television cameras.

‘Look – our fling was ancient history by then. It wasn’t relevant. It’s not relevant now. But I know you’ve got a bee in your bonnet about this girl. And once you’d done some digging, you might have found out.’

‘So you’re telling me because I might have found out.’ Alice’s fingers curl around the paper napkin on her lap, scrunching it into a tight ball. ‘Nice one, George. That’s brilliant.’ She is angry now. ‘Was she there?’ she demands. ‘On the night of the memorial ball? With you, I mean.’

George looks completely baffled. ‘Darling, what on earth are you talking about?’

‘There’s red hair in the photograph.’ She hadn’t meant it to come out like this.

‘What?’ George rubs his forehead.

‘In that photo of you and Dan, on your desk, there’s a redhead on the edge of the photo. Was she there?’

‘No,’ says George adamantly. ‘No. God knows where she was that night. Not with us. She couldn’t stand me.’

‘Why couldn’t she stand you?’ Alice can feel the bile rising again. ‘Why?’ she demands again.

There is no stopping it this time. Alice grabs her bag and coat and heads for the door. She makes it outside just in time to throw up in a window box.

She is still holding the napkin as she walks away from the restaurant. Alice wipes her mouth and fishes around in her handbag for her mobile and a mint. She’d known, somehow, from the moment she’d seen the girl on the train that George had been involved with her. She pushes the mint to the side of her cheek with her tongue. What else had she missed? She tries to call Christie, but the answerphone picks up.

‘It’s me,’ Alice says. ‘Call me back. There’s something I need to talk to you about.’

She thinks next of Teddy, whose hand occasionally strays to her thigh under the dinner table, giving it a ‘friendly’ squeeze. He owes her a favour.

‘Al!’ He picks up immediately, sounding, as he always did, pleased with himself. ‘What’s up?’

Her voice comes out thin and formal: ‘Teddy, hi. I’ve got a bit of a weird question for you, I’m afraid.’

‘OK.’ She hears the whine of his office door being closed. ‘What is it? Everything OK? George all right?’

‘George is fine.’ She pauses, unsure how to begin. It starts to drizzle. She raises a hand above her head to protect her hair. ‘I don’t know if you remember my mentioning a girl we were at uni with the other night.’ There’s a silence. ‘Who died?’

‘Yes.’

She can hear him typing, imagines his fat fingers on the keyboard, his attention drifting already.

‘I didn’t know her very well.’

Alice takes a breath. ‘George had a fling with her, didn’t he?’

The typing stops. Teddy breathes rather heavily down the phone, not saying anything.

‘I know he did,’ Alice snaps after a moment. ‘He’s just told me.’

‘Well, then why are you asking me?’

‘What was she like?’ Alice begins to trot to the tube station.

Teddy sighs. ‘I honestly didn’t really know her,’ he says. ‘And they were barely together any time at all.’

‘You must know something?’ Alice persists.

She can hear the tapping of his fingers again.

‘She was a bit unstable,’ he says eventually. ‘I seem to remember her throwing George’s things out of the window.’

Alice shelters for a moment under a shop canopy at Chancery Lane, watching people dash through the rain. Dropped newspapers melt into the pavement.

‘Did he love her?’

‘No,’ Teddy laughs. ‘Not at all. She was way too much.’

Alice imagines Teddy checking himself out in his monitor, running a hand through his thinning hair.

‘Can I take you out for a drink, old girl? You sound as if you might need cheering up.’

‘No, you’re all right, Teddy.’ Alice rolls her eyes. ‘I’m not feeling very well. Thanks,’ she says before she hangs up, though she’s not sure what she’s grateful for.

She was way too much, she thinks. It was a strange way to describe someone. And if Ruth was too much, what was Alice? Just enough. She sighs, feeling overwhelmingly nauseous again. Hesitating for a moment, she calls the office to tell them she’ll be taking the rest of the day off. She makes an emergency afternoon appointment with her GP.

As she climbs down the steps to the tube, Alice hangs onto the banister like an old woman. She simply must have a seat on the train.

Finding her favourite place next to the door between carriages, she tilts her face towards the breeze coming through the window. The train snakes its way under London. So George had had a fling – as she suspected – with this girl. So what? Why did it matter? Because he’d lied? Again.

She’d given him an ultimatum when they had started trying for a baby. But perhaps the damage had already been done. It was like a nettle growing in her, stinging her insides. During their quieter, happier phases you could lop off the top, but never pull out the roots. The worst thing was the eternal sense of disappointment. And the slipperiness of it all: the never-knowing, the always-guessing, reading between the lines – sniffing the air, checking the sheets, watching the way he looked around a room. Constantly rubbing the clues between her fingers to see if it felt like another affair.

There had been a few dalliances, as he’d put it, when he first moved to London and she was in St Anthony’s. Alice had got her head around those – just about – and retaliated with an unsatisfactory dalliance or two of her own. Much more painful had been the affair he’d had with a family friend in Witney when he was spending a lot of time there as an MP. After visiting one weekend, Alice had found a scrunchie in the bed of their cottage. There had been a terrible scene. His mother had got involved, leaping to George’s defence, of course. ‘What do you expect him to do if you’re in London working all the time?’ she’d said accusingly. ‘And it’s not as if you have children.’

Her words stayed with Alice. It was as close as his mother had got to direct hostility, but there had been an undercurrent of disapproval as long as she could remember. When the affair ended around four years ago, she and George started trying for a baby, but she couldn’t conceive. There was some talk of IVF after a couple of years, but then there had been a new case for her, a new project for him. There had always seemed to be something more pressing to focus on first and now her body was changing, her cycles were becoming longer. Her mother had had an early menopause, too. It seemed that their chance had passed.

The train fills up fairly quickly as it travels west. By Oxford Street, Alice is boxed in by bodies. It’s stuffy in the packed carriage. Even the air whistling in through the carriage-door window smells stale. The acidity of the vomit burns her throat. Alice swallows, leans her head against the glass partition and looks through the door at the people clustered in the next carriage. One of them is wearing a green dress Alice recognises – she has the same one. It’s made of wool with a high neck: she must be sweltering. Alice’s gaze ascends the woman’s body, up to her hairline. Her hair is swept up in a wide cream scarf, but the strands escaping it are, Alice can see, bright red.

She swallows again, closes her eyes and opens them. Her eyeballs are dry and tired. She pushes herself up a little from her seat, straining to see just a fraction of the woman’s face, but it is turned into the crowd. You’re being ridiculous, she tells herself. Are you going to do this every time you see a woman with red hair?

As the tube begins to slow as it reaches Bond Street, Alice sees the redhead push towards the door. If she could just check, just see her face, then she would know. She gets up from her seat, stepping over bags, nudging past people. ‘Excuse me,’ she mutters, swinging her arms out to steady herself. A woman in a too-tight navy skirt sighs at her loudly.

The blurred faces waiting on the platform come into focus. There’s a wall of them outside. Alice fights through in the direction of the next carriage, but there is no sign of the woman she saw. She pushes faster through the crowd, but it is difficult against the tide of passengers getting on the train. Can she see red hair falling from a cream scarf? Is that a green dress vanishing into the distance?