The French Girl(47)
“And did he?” she asks.
“I’m not sure. I pretty much passed out myself. He woke me up going to the bathroom at something like six in the morning, so sometime before then I suppose.” The clock, Seb stepping out of his boxer shorts, those glowing golden hairs . . . the clock, Seb . . .
“So he could have come in anytime before that.”
“I suppose . . .” Only it has just occurred to me that in my memory Seb is on my side of the bed. The side with the chair, where he’d got into the habit of tossing his clothes when he undressed. And he’s stepping out of boxer shorts. In the entire time we’d been in France, he’d always grabbed a towel from the hook behind the door and wrapped it round him to go to the communal bathroom—or on occasion run the gauntlet naked. He’d never ever bothered to fish around for a pair of boxer shorts. “Or maybe . . . maybe that was him coming to bed for the first time. I don’t know . . .” What do I really remember and what is a reconstruction? I can’t trust in anything anymore.
“How do you accidentally kill someone?”
I shrug. “Unlucky blow to the head, perhaps? She could have tripped and smacked her head on something. I suppose the autopsy would show that.”
“And how long do you suppose you need to accidentally kill a girl and dump her body?” Lara asks, with deliberate drollery.
“Well, in my vast experience of accidental homicide . . .” I reply, equally drolly. I have definitely had too much wine if I’m being this flippant about the girl that haunts me. “Jesus, I don’t know. I suppose he must have spent some time screwing her first, though God knows how long that would have taken in his drunken state.”
“And then surely there must have been a period of panic, deciding what to do . . .” She trails off. “But, you know, this is all just a thought exercise. It’s not even hypothetical; after all, she got on the bus. Right?”
Her eyes catch mine and hold, and I recognize the uncertainty in them; it matches the tight knot in my belly. She wants me to reassure her. I wanted her to reassure me, and look where that landed me.
“Right,” I say quietly.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I suggest Lara stays the night, half expecting to hear, No thanks, I’d rather wake up in my own bed, but she accepts gratefully. I try to remember the last time she did that; we used to stay with each other a lot in the years just after leaving university, a subconscious attempt to re-create the messy hubbub of student housing, where nobody need ever be alone. It occurs to me that now I am almost always alone: long periods of isolation broken by short human interactions that don’t leave me feeling any less solitary. It’s probably not good for me—at least, it’s probably not good for me that I don’t mind. In any case, I think with dark humor, now I have Severine for company.
I have a spare bedroom, but Lara crawls into bed with me like days of old, and turns on her side, resting her head on her bent arm. In the warm glow of the bedside light I can see her eyeliner is smudged and her eyelids are heavy with the wine; she looks blowsy and sloppy and decadently sexy. Modan wakes up to this, I think. Does the effect ever wear off? One day will he look at her and move on without lingering, his brain ticking over his to-do list for the day? Or will he always stop for a moment, arrested by the sight, and perhaps touch the back of his hand to her cheek? And Tom, does he remember what she looked like in his bed all those years ago? Does he yearn to see her there now? I cut off that train of thought quickly and turn on my back to look at the ceiling instead. There were times at Oxford, and in the years after, when I had stabs of jealousy toward Lara: for her effortless magnetism, her easygoing take-it-or-leave-it flirting, for how her very presence dimmed mine in the eyes of the male population. Then I would reason those feelings away; I would console myself that I appealed to the more discerning gentleman . . . I thought I had grown up, cast off my insecurities, but here we are a decade on: it’s so demeaning to realize that actually nothing has changed.
“Tom,” says Lara uncannily if sleepily, pulling my gaze back to her. “Come on, time to tell all.”
I rub a hand over my face, not trusting my voice for a moment, then recover and say, “Not much to tell.”
“You’re pretty upset for not much to tell.”
“I was drunk—well, we both were. We were sharing a cab, and I went up to his flat for a cup of tea—no, really, just tea!” I protest on Lara’s raised eyebrow. “Then somehow, I don’t know, we were kissing and then . . . God, I think I passed out.” I pull the pillow over my face. “It’s beyond humiliating,” I say, lifting it enough to let the words out. “And then this morning Tom was livid with me—he thinks I abused our friendship—and he was . . . mean. And it upset me.” I shrug and put the pillow down, concentrating on the ceiling. “It’s fine that he doesn’t want to . . . doesn’t want anything between us”—no it’s not, no it’s not, it doesn’t feel fine at all—“but he was pretty nasty.” It doesn’t feel fine to be confessing my humiliation at not being wanted to the girl he really wants, either. I wonder if she’s pleased that she hasn’t been usurped, and then I’m promptly ashamed of myself.
“Tom nasty?” Lara’s eyebrows are raised in astonishment, the hairs glowing golden in the light.