The Family Remains(57)
And now, somehow, Lucy has no idea how, a policeman in London has discovered that Birdie is dead and has decided that it must have something to do with the people she once lived with, and she has no idea how this policeman in London has made this connection and how things have got to the point of this policeman arriving on her daughter’s doorstep in St Albans and asking her uncomfortable questions about her family set-up, but she knows that those questions won’t stop once they start, that more questions will follow like steps in a dance until they get to the point in Lucy’s life, almost a year ago, when she did something shocking, something terrible, and she feels the noose around her neck growing tighter and tighter until she almost cannot breathe.
43
April 2017
Rachel finally switched on her phone again a week after she left Michael. There was nothing from him. No missed calls, no messages. She was both surprised and relieved. Each day she awoke in her apartment in Camden Town and opened her eyes and wondered for a second where she was in her life. Her dreams every night were vivid and confusing. In her dreams she married Michael again; she slept with Michael again. In her dreams she told Michael that she loved him, that she missed him, that she wanted him. She kissed him and held him in her dreams and then she would awake and soon remember reality and feel glad and unburdened, climb off her bed and greet the day in the soft embrace of benign solitude. The days were growing warmer, longer, kinder. She kept the doors open to her balcony for as long as the sun shone through them, drank her morning coffee out there and reconnected with all the weird and wonderful people in her canalside community, some of whom had barely noticed that she’d been gone, some of whom were full of curiosity about her absence.
On the Monday after she left (this was how she phrased it in her head: she left him – that was it, nothing more) she met with Dom’s friend, Thea, the shit-hot divorce lawyer. Thea lived in Primrose Hill so they met halfway between them in a deli on Gloucester Avenue, abutting the canal. Dom told Rachel that it was to be a freebie, a favour, a fifteen minute-er, so Rachel didn’t waste any time with small-talk. She said, ‘I met this guy in August, we had our first date in November, got engaged in December, married in February and from the fourth day of the honeymoon it’s been an absolute disaster.’
‘Disaster,’ said Thea, unpeeling a curl of pastry off a cinnamon roll. ‘What sort of disaster?’
‘Emotionally abusive.’
Thea narrowed her eyes at Rachel, then popped the pastry into her mouth between rose-tinted lips. ‘In what way?’
‘Well, we experienced a moment of – sexual incompatibility on our honeymoon. I suggested trying something new. He was appalled. Ever since, he’s used it to punish me. He’s been having problems with – well, with maintaining an erection. He’s lost all his money—’
‘How much money?’
‘Oh. I don’t know. He’s cagey about his finances, but over a million. Yes, definitely over a million. So, I’ve been paying for everything.’
‘So you married him thinking he was wealthy?’
‘Yes. Yes I did. Turns out the condo in the ski resort was a timeshare, the house in Martha’s Vineyard was a summer lease and he’s renting out his house in Antibes to cover the mortgage repayments on his flat in London. Everything else he had was cash, and he’s lost it all.’
‘So, since you married, he’s lost both his money and his erectile function?’
‘Essentially. Yes.’
Thea breathed in hard through her tiny nostrils and leaned back in her chair. Her fingertips ran over the flakes of pastry on the rim of her plate. ‘Some might be tempted to refer you to your wedding vows, Rachel. For richer, for poorer, etc.’ She cocked an eyebrow at Rachel, and Rachel felt her fists clench under the table.
‘It’s more than that, though. He became controlling.’
‘In what way?’
‘As in always wanting me straight home after work for dinner, that sort of thing.’
The eyebrow cocked again. ‘And what would he do if you weren’t home after work for dinner?’
‘He would … well, I don’t know really, because I always was. And then once, last week, I wasn’t, and he threw a plate of risotto at the wall.’
‘Was he aiming it at you?’
‘No. I mean. I wasn’t actually there. I just got home and found it there.’
‘And what else? What else did he do when you didn’t come home for dinner?’
Rachel could feel where this conversation was going. She could see how threadbare her case was without the horror of what Michael had done to her on the sofa the previous week. She glanced up quickly at Thea, absorbed the two fans of perfectly mascaraed eyelashes, the fresh-out-of-the-specialist-dry-cleaners’-bag cashmere crewneck, the squared-off fingernails, the simple gold wedding band and Michael Kors sunglasses perched on top of improbably shiny red hair, and she thought: This woman would not let that happen to her. This woman has never been violated like that. Her body never used as a piece of meat. And she knew that the only way she could persuade this woman that she had a good case to divorce this man was to throw the rape down on the table between them. But she could not. She simply could not. So she sighed and she said, ‘Nothing. Just that. Just the thrown risotto.’