The It Girl(118)

Inside it’s not exactly warm, but it’s a hell of a lot warmer than the street, and she presses the button for the tiny old-fashioned lift with its folding screen door, and waits while it clanks down the stairwell. As it rises up to Hugh’s flat she has to fight the urge to sink to her knees, cradling her bump, howling with the awfulness of what has just happened—an awfulness she is only now beginning to comprehend. And Hugh—Hugh tried to tell her. That’s the worst of it. He tried to warn her what would happen if she kept pushing and digging and refusing to accept the version of events they had all learned to live with. He tried to tell her and she ignored him, and now she is paying the price.

When the lift stops with a clang at the fifth floor, Hugh is standing outside, wearing a paisley silk dressing gown and holding a cup of coffee. He isn’t wearing his glasses, which gives his face an oddly unfinished, vulnerable look. But as Hannah pulls back the folding brass grille, his expression changes from one of puzzled welcome to a kind of confused dismay.

“What the—Hannah old bean, what happened? Where are your shoes? And is that… is that blood?”

Hannah looks down. It’s true. Her feet are bleeding and she hadn’t even noticed. She has no idea whether she’s picked up a piece of glass or just stubbed her toe on the rough asphalt, but there are smears of red on the checkerboard tiled floor of the lift.

“Oh shit, Hugh, I’m so sorry—”

She bends, trying to reach past her bump in the confined space, but Hugh is shaking his head. He takes her arm firmly, pulling her forcibly upright and propelling her down the corridor towards the open door of his flat with a firm but kindly hand in between her shoulders.

“Absolutely not. You, get yourself inside. I’ll call housekeeping to deal with that.”

“But your carpets—” Hannah stops in the entrance to the flat. She had forgotten Hugh’s carpets—a pristine cream expanse that runs the length of the enormous hallway and stairs. Hugh rolls his eyes as if to say damn the carpets, but he pauses and opens a cupboard concealed behind paneling, bringing out a pair of slippers.

“There you go. Put those on if it’s only going to make you fret. Now for God’s sake, sit down before you fall down. What on earth happened?”

“It was Will,” Hannah finds herself saying, but to her horror, the rest of the words won’t come. Instead there are tears crowding at the back of her throat, forcing their way up, prickling out through her eyes and running down the sides of her nose. A great, ugly sob comes out with no warning, and then another, and suddenly she is racked with them—huge, unmanageable, body-convulsing sobs that feel like they are going to tear her apart.

“Oh, Han, no,” Hugh says uncomfortably, and then he holds out his arms, awkwardly, and almost in spite of herself Hannah stumbles into them. Hugh is not one of nature’s huggers. He is too tall and bony to be comfortable, too physically ungainly. But he is good, and kind, and he is Hugh. They stand, locked together in Hugh’s hallway, Hannah’s bump intruding uncomfortably between them, and she bawls like a child into the embroidered silk lapel of Hugh’s dressing gown.

At last her sobs subside into gasps, and then hiccups, and then finally just shuddering breaths, and she gets a hold of herself and pulls away. As she wipes her eyes, and then her glasses, she realizes with a kind of shameful horror that she has slobbered all over what is probably a very expensive dry-clean-only garment.

“I’m sorry,” she says. Her voice is croaky. “I didn’t mean—oh God, your beautiful dressing gown. I’m so sorry, Hugh.” She sniffs and gulps. “Have you got a tissue?”

“Here,” Hugh says. She’s not sure where it came from, but he’s holding out a laundered linen square with HAB on one corner. Hannah looks at it doubtfully. Handkerchiefs in her house are made of paper. But at last she blows her nose and then, unsure what to do with it—she can hardly hand it back to Hugh—she puts it in her pocket, intending to slip it into the laundry hamper when she goes to the bathroom.

“Better?” Hugh says, and she nods. It’s both true and untrue. She needed that cry, badly, and she does feel better. It was cathartic in a way no talk could ever have been. But in another way, nothing is better. It’s just as awful and fucked up and unfixable as it was when she walked through the door to Hugh’s flat.

“Come into the living room, sit down,” Hugh says, “and then I’ll make you a cup of tea, and you can tell me all about it.”



* * *



SOME HALF HOUR LATER, HANNAH is sitting on Hugh’s white velvet couch, with her slippered feet tucked under her and a blanket around her legs, and Hugh has his head in his hands.

“So he admitted it?” he asks now, as if he can’t believe it. “He actually said he killed April?”

“Not in so many words,” Hannah says. The sentences feel unreal in her mouth. “But I asked him, and he said—” She stops, gulps, and forces herself on. “He said ‘What do you think?’ And then he laughed.”

“Oh my God,” Hugh says wretchedly. He looks up at Hannah, his face utterly bleak.

“I wish—God, I almost wish I’d never told you about the noises.”

Hannah shakes her head.

“Hugh, no. God, no. If it’s true—” But she stops at that. She can’t bring herself to say it. “Hugh,” she asks instead, knowing she is clutching at straws, “Hugh, was it definitely him? It couldn’t have been a scout or sound traveling through the walls or something?”