He Said/She Said(55)
‘Don’t freak out, but it’s Beth. From Cornwall.’
Kit’s mouth fell open. ‘How – what’s she doing here? How’d she even find you?’
‘She turned up at work last night. I gave her a card at court.’ I realised the significance of the words seconds after they were out. Kit’s eyes flicked back and forth as though over abacus beads: Beth left the court building after giving evidence. Ergo she was not present from the second day onwards. Ergo Laura must have spoken to her on the first day. Ergo Laura lied to me about where she was, spoke to a witness and jeopardised the case.
‘When did you even.’
I caught at his hand. ‘We met by accident, in the toilets.’ I was whispering but talking fast so he didn’t have time to work out that I hadn’t used the lavatory while we were there together. Had he worked out that I had sneaked from the hotel room while he slept, he’d have been rightly furious. ‘Please don’t be cross, it was a sput-of-the-moment thing and I promise you we didn’t discuss the case.’ Kit gave me a look I recognised from my dad; I’m not angry with you, Laura, I’m just very disappointed. I sat down beside him. ‘Look, leaving aside how she found me, I need to tell you why. She came to my work because she was really upset. Jamie Balcombe’s been given leave to appeal against his conviction.’
‘Whoa.’ Kit ran a hand over his unshaven chin. ‘If it goes to retrial, you’d better hope nobody saw you talking in the toilets, let alone that you’ve started having sleepovers with her.’ There was contempt under his anger, sending a rush of fear through me. I could tolerate the anger, but I could not bear to lose his esteem. If my talking to Beth made him react like this, he could never find out what I said in the witness box.
‘You don’t have to whisper, I’m awake now,’ came Beth’s voice from the sitting room. I left Kit half dressed and angry in our bedroom. Beth was on her feet, yawning. When I noticed what she was wearing, I saw that I’d fucked up on yet another level. The T-shirt I’d groped for in the dark was Kit’s prized Chile ’91 souvenir shirt, threadbare and holey even then but so precious to Kit he barely wore it; and I had let Beth sleep in it.
‘Hang on,’ I said, throwing the bedcover round her like a cape and drawing it tight around her neck. ‘Just stay like this, I’ll explain later.’
She obeyed the command without questioning, and I wondered again how complicit we were. When Kit emerged she looked bizarre, her dark curly hair a volcano’s plume above a white mountain of bedclothes.
‘Hi,’ she said shyly to Kit. ‘It’s nice to see you again. Sorry for monopolising your futon.’
‘That’s ok,’ said Kit mechanically, then disappeared into the bathroom, almost slamming the door behind him.
‘He’s not really a morning person,’ I said, filling the kettle. ‘Sorry, d’ you mind taking off that T-shirt? It’s one of his best, he’ll go nuts if he finds out you’ve slept in it.’
She shrugged off her shroud, looked down at the raggedy garment in puzzlement, then turned away to change into last night’s clothes. She had a huge tattoo across her back and shoulders, a pair of vast, spread angel wings, beautiful in their pen-and-ink detail, like something from an eighteenth-century zoology textbook. They flexed with the muscles on her back. I forced myself not to stare. After I’d stashed Chile ’91 back into the wardrobe – really, he should have wrapped it in tissue or something if he didn’t want people to wear it by accident – I found Beth, arms folded, standing in front of Kit’s huge map of the world.
‘What are all the lines?’ she asked. ‘Aeroplane flight paths?’
I’d forgotten what a puzzle it was to the uninitiated. ‘It’s the path of totality for all the different eclipses of Kit’s lifetime,’ I explained.
Beth’s smile faltered as she lined up her finger next to mine and traced the shadow path across the English Channel and into Europe. ‘That’s last year,’ she said, resting on Cornwall. ‘But why all the others?’ she asked.
‘He follows eclipses around the world; well, we both do now. He’s been doing it since he was a kid. We’ve got trips lined up into the next millennium; the festival movement seems to be growing. Next one’s in Zambia in a couple of years, so I should actually get to see it this time.’ I heard myself through Beth’s ears and could have punched myself in the face. I wanted to pull the map off the wall; it seemed so crass that the worst day of her life was reduced to a souvenir diagram. ‘God, I’m sorry, that’s so insensitive. Here I am moaning about being clouded out, after what you went through.’
She waved my apology away, but her bottom lip was clamped tight between her teeth. Her attention moved away from the map towards the framed photograph underneath it. Ling had taken it a couple of months before the Lizard. It was the evening of my graduation, and in the photograph Kit and I were entwined on the grass in hired finery; Kit in black tie, me in a pale gold ballgown. Our legs were locked together, our fingers linked, and an empty bottle of champagne lay beside us. We were surrounded by other people but utterly careless of their existence. We will never have another picture taken like it. It’s not just the dewy complexions and tight jawlines that can’t be recaptured.
‘We didn’t know anyone was watching,’ I said. ‘That’s why she got such a perfect moment.’