In a Dark, Dark Wood(17)

There was silence for a while as she negotiated the last and most rutted part of the drive, and then we swung onto the gravelled space at the front of the house, tucking in neatly between Nina’s hire car and Flo’s Landrover.

Clare turned off the engine and for a minute we just sat in the dark car, contemplating the house, with the players inside ranged like actors on a stage, just as Tom had said. There was Flo, beavering away in the kitchen, bending over the oven. Melanie was hunched over the phone in the living room, Tom sprawled across a sofa directly opposite the plate-glass window, flicking through a magazine. Nina was nowhere to be seen – out having a fag on the balcony, most likely.

Why am I here? I thought again, with a kind of agony this time. Why did I come?

Then Clare turned to me, her face lit by the golden light streaming from the house. ‘Lee—’ she said, at the same time as I said, ‘Look—’

‘What?’ she asked.

I shook my head. ‘No, you go first.’

‘No you, honestly. It wasn’t important.’

My heart was beating painfully in my chest, and suddenly I couldn’t ask it any more, the question on the tip of my tongue. Instead I forced out, ‘I’m not Lee any more. I’m Nora.’

‘What?’

‘My name. I don’t go by Lee any more. I never liked it.’

‘Oh.’ She was silent, digesting this. ‘OK. So it’s Nora now, huh?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, I’ll do my best to remember. It’s going to be hard though – after, what, twenty-one years of knowing you as Lee.’

But you never knew me, I thought involuntarily, and then frowned. Of course Clare had known me. She’d known me since I was five. That was exactly the problem – she knew me too well. She saw through the thin, adult veneer to the scrawny, frightened child beneath.

‘Why, Clare?’ I said suddenly, and she looked up, her face blank and pale in the darkness.

‘Why what?’

‘Why am I here?’

‘Oh God.’ She looked down at her hands. ‘I knew you’d ask that. I suppose you wouldn’t believe me if I said auld lang syne and all that?’

I shook my head. ‘It’s not that, is it? You had ten years to make contact if you wanted to. Why now?’

‘Because …’ She took a deep breath, and I was astonished to realise that she was nervous. It was hard to process. I’d never seen her anything less than totally self-possessed; even aged five, she’d had a stare that could make the most hardened teacher melt, or wilt, whichever she chose. It was, I suppose, why we’d been friends, in a strange way. She had what I craved: that all-encompassing self-possession. Even standing in her shadow I’d felt stronger. But not any more.

‘Because …’ she said again, and I saw her chipped, lacquered nails glint, red as blood, as her fingers twisted together and her nails caught the light from the house and reflected it back into the car. ‘Because I thought you deserved to know. Deserved to be told – face to face. I promised … I promised myself I’d do it to your face.’

‘What?’ I leaned forward. I wasn’t frightened, only puzzled. I’d forgotten my stained wet shoes, and the stench of sweat on my clothes. I’d forgotten everything apart from this: Clare’s worried face, filled with an edgy vulnerability I’d never seen before.

‘It’s about the wedding,’ she said. She looked down at her hands. ‘It’s about … it’s about who I’m marrying.’

‘Who?’ I said. And then, to make her laugh, to try to break the tension that was filling the car and infecting me, I said, ‘It’s not Rick, is it? I always knew—’

‘No,’ she broke in, meeting my eyes at last, and there was not a shred of laughter there, only a kind of steely determination, as if she were about to do something unpleasant but utterly necessary. ‘No. It’s James.’





7


FOR A MOMENT I stared at her, willing myself to have misheard.

‘What?’

‘It … it’s James. I’m marrying James.’

I said nothing. I sat, staring out at the sentinel trees, hearing the blood in my ears hiss and pound. Something was building inside me like a scream. But I said nothing. I pushed it back down.

James?

Clare and James?

‘That’s why I asked you.’ She was speaking fast now, as though she knew she didn’t have much time, that I might get up and bolt from the car at any moment. ‘I didn’t want— I thought I shouldn’t invite you to the wedding. I thought it would be too hard. But I couldn’t bear for you to hear it from somewhere else.’

‘But … then who the hell is William Pilgrim?’ It burst out of me like an accusation. For a second Clare looked at me blankly. Then she realised, and her face changed, and at the same second I knew where I’d heard that name before, and realised how stupid I’d been. Billy Pilgrim. Slaughterhouse-Five. James’s favourite book.

‘It’s his Facebook name,’ I said dully. ‘For privacy – so fans don’t find his personal profile when they search. That’s why he doesn’t have a profile picture. Right?’

Clare nodded wretchedly. ‘I never meant to mislead you,’ she said pleadingly. She reached her warm hand out towards my numb, mud-spattered one. ‘And James thought you should know before—’