The Stranger at the Wedding, page 21
Annie made to speak, but too late; Cameron strode past her into the hallway, rattling a lone, tatty umbrella on the hatstand.
‘Lovely place you have here,’ said Cameron, as he surveyed every inch of the hallway, and what little he could see of the kitchen from his vantage point. ‘I hope I’m not intruding.’
‘Well, actually—’
‘Good. I do hate to come unannounced.’ Cameron removed his gloves and his long mohair overcoat before gesturing to the living room. ‘Shall we?’
On the drive up, Cameron was uncomfortable at the notion of playing the part of the obnoxious, uninvited guest, and yet, to his great surprise, here he was, in his element, a duck to water. Besides, he’d done it once at the wedding, he could do it again now.
Annie, visibly exasperated, acceded by way of a nod and followed the almost stranger into the living room, which he too appraised with an auctioneer’s eye. That same eye cast around the fripperies of the room until it rested on a framed photo of Annie’s father, nestled among various house-warming cards.
‘A handsome man,’ said Cameron, replacing the photo. ‘You have his nose.’
Annie smiled at the intended compliment, and Cameron thought he saw a softening then, but he couldn’t be sure.
‘You had a little gathering here recently,’ he said, his gaze drawn to a pyramid of empty beer cans by the wood basket. ‘I’d ask the occasion but –’ His gaze tracked back to the cards.
Annie cleared her throat in an attempt to reclaim an air of authority. Cameron could see that a quiet anger simmered within. Still, she remained calm, collected, but most of all defiant.
‘Is there something you wanted? It’s a little late and I was just about to—’
‘Yes.’ Cameron held her eye, and his nerve. ‘I came to apologise for our unfortunate meeting. I had no right to crash your wedding, uninvited’ – he appreciated the irony of this apology – ‘and I certainly had no right to anger you.’
‘What were you doing there?’
‘I have been looking for someone.’
‘And you thought that someone would be at my wedding?’ Annie was snappish now.
‘Not exactly.’
‘Then what?’
Cameron scratched the back of his head as he always did when he was on the brink of broaching a difficult subject.
‘Mark’s first wife. Hope. I’m sure you’ve heard the—’
It was Annie’s turn to cut her visitor short. ‘I’m aware of Mark’s past, if that’s what you mean.’
‘Then I’m sure you’re aware she’s been missing for more than two years now, presumed dead. In the eyes of the law, one cannot get married again if one already is – unless that spouse is dead, of course.’ Cameron thought he saw a flash of panic in the upward thrust of her chin. He tried again, more delicately. ‘I’m trying to trace her, on the assumption she may still be alive. I wondered if you could help me.’
Annie shook her head, defiantly. ‘How? I never knew the woman.’
‘Perhaps you’d heard something, or found something. Something that might point to her intentions.’
‘She left a note, if that’s what you mean.’
‘I’m aware of the note.’
‘But you don’t believe it?’
‘The authorities might be satisfied but I am not. I don’t believe in accepting the first truth you’re presented with. There’s often another one lurking beneath.’
‘So you think Mark was lying?’
‘I haven’t said that.’
‘As good as.’
Cameron sighed. It was like arguing with an older sister. He tried a different tack.
‘You and I have a great deal more in common than you realise.’
Annie smirked. ‘Do strangers doorstepping you late at night also catch your ire?’
Cameron had had enough. He’d tried to play nice and it was getting him nowhere. ‘No, but people with something to hide do.’
‘I thought you’d come here to apologise?’
‘I had. Apology’s over.’
Annie stalked over to her phone and picked it up. ‘I want you gone right this minute, or I’m calling Mark.’
Cameron took a seat on the sofa and put his feet up on the coffee table.
‘I don’t think you want to do that,’ he said slowly, confidently.
‘And why’s that?’
‘What I have to say might best be kept between us. For now. Besides, I know he’s recently gone back to work, finally. You’ll struggle to recall him from theatre. I don’t think surgeons take phone calls mid-operation. Of course, you can try the police too, if you like. But I don’t think that’s going to help you either.’
Annie hesitated before slamming down the phone, frustration seemingly having got the better of her.
‘Take a seat,’ said Cameron. ‘You seem a little flushed.’
This was the part Cameron liked. The bait had been set, the rod cast, and any moment now the fish would swim to the lure. But the struggle seemed to have gone out of this one. All he had to do, he thought now, was dredge the water with the net.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Don’t be shy.’
Reluctantly, Annie sat in the armchair opposite, where she cut a diminutive figure against its wide, sprawling floral pattern. She placed her hands on the arms and gripped them tightly.
‘My investigation has turned up some very interesting information, very interesting indeed.’
The colour drained from Annie’s face.
‘I spoke with a few of Mark’s neighbours – John and Diane to the left, Jake and Alan Carswell to the right. I doubt these names will mean much to you.’
Annie looked blank.
‘Thought so. A while before Hope’s disappearance, they all recall seeing a woman standing by the post box opposite, once a week, sometimes more than that, often for hours on end, often at night, a few mornings. Diane called the police one evening, but by the time they arrived, the woman had scarpered. She stopped coming after that, so Diane put it from her mind. That is, until several months later, when the same woman was seen regularly dropping Hope off at her house. She never went inside.’
‘This is an intriguing story,’ snapped Annie, ‘but I fail to see the relevance.’
Cameron leant in. ‘This is where it gets good.’
Annie’s eyes darted to the door, but her feet stayed put.
‘I asked what this woman looked like. They all gave me exactly the same description.’
‘Let me guess: a slim brunette? Am I supposed to be unique?’
‘Not unique, no. But something else occurred to me as I stood outside Mark’s house, from the same vantage point as that woman.’
Cameron stood up at this point and began pacing tightly around the living room, one hand in his pocket, the other on his chin, and his head faced squarely at the floor.
‘You had a sister, didn’t you?’
‘I have a sister: Karen.’
‘Another sister. Younger still, or at least she would be, if –’
Annie swallowed hard. ‘Jessica,’ she said.
‘Very good. And perhaps you could remind me of her middle name.’
Annie seemed to grip the arms of her chair even tighter. Had she a little more strength in her wrists, she might have torn each arm in two. For a time, her eyes were fixed to the floor before springing up again to regard her accuser. Her judge, her jury, her executioner.
‘I’ll give you a clue. It begins with a C.’
‘I know what it is,’ said Annie, a renewed resolve punctuating her words. ‘Her middle name was Charlotte.’
Cameron stood stock-still and considered Annie. The constant pacing had rendered him a little dizzy. Perhaps his blood pressure was low. He should get that checked.
‘Hope had a friend called Charlotte,’ he said. ‘She used to attend her yoga classes. Started doing so twelve months before she disappeared.’
Annie was exasperated. ‘It’s a common name.’
‘Perhaps. Mind if I take a look around?’ said Cameron, but he didn’t wait for an answer. ‘Of course you don’t.’ He strode out into the hallway and through to the kitchen, with Annie in close pursuit.
‘Just what do you think you’re doing?’ she barked. ‘This really is—’
‘I’ll just be a moment, and then I’m gone. I assure you. My wife is waiting for me with a late supper, and it’s coq au vin tonight. Not one to miss.’
With Annie only ever an inch behind, he worked his way around the house, room by room, but stopped short of entering her bedroom. He thought that would be rather gauche. Satisfied, he walked back down the stairs, each one groaning underfoot, and then stood at the bottom, looking up at Annie, stood waiting on the landing.
‘It really is a lovely house.’ He smiled. ‘I’m sure you and Mark will be very—’
His words trailed off as his eyes alighted on a narrow door, which he’d written off as a cupboard. But now he wasn’t so sure. He grabbed for the handle, pulled, and there, opening out before him, was another set of stairs, descending into darkness, into the basement.
‘Now what might we have here? Be a shame to leave without taking the full tour. Annie, be a dear and join me down here, won’t you? I can’t seem to find the light.’
Cameron stood facing the basement entrance. The staircase behind him creaked with Annie’s footsteps, until she reached the bottom, when all fell silent. His thoughts ran away from him in the quiet, and he wondered whether she might do something silly, whether she might pick up a vase and—’
‘Sure,’ said Annie, composed. She ran a loose hair behind her left ear. ‘Let me lead the way.’
She descended into the darkness a little and found the pull switch. The light spluttered into life.
‘Well? Are you coming or not?’ she said challengingly.
As Cameron looked at the half-lit basement, suddenly he was a boy again, walking down the stairs, watching his father bent over his lathe, turning something in his workshop, inviting little Cam, dungarees and all, over to watch him, placing a chisel in his hands, tendrils of shavings curling up and out, a dram of whisky, a sleeping mother. Boy and man. That seemed so long ago now; so very much had happened since.
The basement was spartan. On the cold concrete floor stood only a depleted wine rack, a box of Christmas decorations and a small, old-fashioned trunk with brass clasps and leather bindings. Cameron walked to it with mounting unease.
‘There’s nothing in there,’ she snapped. But Cameron opened it anyway, rifled through an assortment of ephemera – magazines, ticket stubs, journals, a torch, a child’s dress, paints and paintbrushes. Nothing of any real interest, not to Cameron at least.
‘Who’s the artist?’
‘My father is. Was,’ Annie corrected herself.
Cameron smiled. ‘We really aren’t so different after all.’
Annie didn’t answer; she was too busy focused on a patch of wall at the far end of the basement, a strip of wallpaper that was coming away at the bottom left-hand corner, crinkled and upturned, steamed away by the nearby heat pipes. Cameron noticed this, noticed her panicked expression, turned, felt a frisson of fear ripple through his companion, felt the fish tug finally on the line, felt her tug on his shoulder in a small attempt to stop him lunging forward and taking the corner in his hand, to stop him pulling and pulling and pulling, to stop him seeing what lay beneath, what had been etched into the paint a long time ago, to stop him discovering the writing on the wall.
As he went down in a final, decisive hard slap against the cold concrete floor and felt the warm trickle of blood run down and around the crown of his head, he thought he heard, distantly, as though a whisper, his father’s voice calling to him from the lathe.
38
I once thought the truth was immutable; I once thought it was cast in stone, engraved in bronze, that it was unchanging, a constant in the otherwise shifting sands of friendship, of courtship, of marriage. I once thought the truth was sacrosanct, that no matter how much one tried to suppress it, to deny it, to bury it deep, that it would bubble up, rise to the surface; that the truth will out. And yet, as I have come to discover, that is the biggest lie of them all, a fiction we’re fed from birth, bound up in the foolish notion of good and evil, of two opposing forces engaged in an eternal battle for supremacy, from which there can be only one victor. And it is good, we’re told, that must prevail; that there is no place in this world for evil.
But how can anything be so utterly binary? At some point the two battlefronts – the black and the white – must meet, must descend from their hills bearing their standards and converge in this struggle, limb embroiled in limb, until the defining essence of each becomes lost; until grey, the noblest of all colours, emerges. It is here, in the melting pot of right and wrong, fact and fiction, in the victory of union, that truth exists, if at all. The truth is not fixed, it is as shifting as the sands. It is the product of a negotiation, and it is all a matter of perspective.
Stories make us and break us, shape us and elevate us. Stories have raised civilisations and levelled others. Stories are power, they are triumph, they are the lies we tell ourselves to find the strength to carry on. We yearn, so desperately, for stories, no matter how fanciful or escapist, to reflect something of us, something recognisable, and in so doing, that they might reveal something unseen, something about us, or within us, that we hadn’t considered. Sometimes that is the case, but not always. For when the mirror is held up, we only ever see a distortion; we only ever see an image that is simultaneously true and not true, real and unreal. And so when I held up the mirror to our relationship, to Mark and me, I saw only that which I wished to see, and only that which I wished to be seen. I found my light, as the influencers say, the light that would tell the best story. It is all a matter of perspective. And this is mine.
We met on the train, on our commute. That much is true. We met again, we met fully, properly, outside the Richmond Centre. That much is also true. We dated, we laughed, we fell in love, we fucked like teenagers and fought like cat and dog. We married on a sunlit autumn day and had a mildly disastrous honeymoon, until the tide turned and we found each other again, just before the waves threatened to break over our heads. That is all true. My word is my record, where once it was my bond. But it’s not quite as simple as that.
I didn’t believe in love at first sight, thought it a dismal notion that was all too often vaunted over and above a more slowburning, creeping kind of love – that this widespread primacy somehow invalidated all the relationships I’d known and enjoyed to date. I thought it a Hollywood invention, a fable passed between school desks, a promise that could not be delivered upon. And yet, I was wrong. The day I first saw Mark on that train, the moment I saw his arm gripping the bar for support among a crush of bleary-eyed commuters, the long lock of dark-brown hair that grazed his eyebrow, I fell – I hate to admit – utterly, madly in love with him.
The more I looked at him, the more I thought I understood him: the job he held, the people he met, the procession of ex-girlfriends who left love-starved voicemails on his phone … But understanding wasn’t enough. A great fire had been lit within me and it needed feeding with wood and petrol. I needed to see the man beneath the image I’d constructed and forced upon him. I needed to see the real Mark. And had it stopped there, had my fascination with him bedded down in my imagination, had I marvelled at the fantasy and not sought the truth, things might have been different. She might still be with him.
She might still be alive.
*
Their house was the kind of house that every little girl dreams of. Large front garden studded with roses of all different hues: reds, oranges, lilacs, yellows, pinks. There were hollyhocks and lemon trees, phlox, lupins, honeysuckle and lavender. There was a Japanese maple, a deep, hungry red, that bowed in welcome. There was a black-and-white tessellated path, a mint-green fence and door, and a bicycle perched up against the porch. But there was no sign of any children – no scooters or skateboards or helmets or basketball hoops. It was a family home waiting on a family.
Two figures moved about behind the windows, behind the French shutters, in a hive of activity. He was handsome, she was pretty. They had everything, it seemed. Well, almost everything. They were together, but not really; each operated as if in isolation, in a vacuum. That is to say, dimly aware of each other’s presence but thoroughly uninterested. Bored, perhaps. There was no love between them, I could see that from my position opposite, partially obscured by the hanging branches of an oak tree. I could see them, they couldn’t see me, and they certainly couldn’t see each other. I doubted they had even looked, properly looked, at one another in years. At one point in time they must have, long ago. They must have shared a bond, a connection that they believed would endure, would see them through the very best and the very worst, in sickness and in health, for richer, for poorer. The rings on their fingers told one part of the story, but their bodies told another.
They ate breakfast together, they dined together, they shared a glass of wine in the evenings. They would talk, but not really. They would laugh but it was joyless. Once a week, they would make love – Sundays at 10 a.m. – but neither of them would cum, and they’d given up faking it. It struck me that they’d spent so much of their lives living out the same week on repeat. Breakfast, work, dinner, breakfast, work, dinner. The Sunday fuck was thrown in just to remind them that they were still alive, until that too became routine, until that too reminded them both just how trapped they were.
How do I know all this? I studied them over many months; studied their patterns, their movements, their routines.
At first, I just wanted to see where he lived, nothing more, so I waited outside North Dulwich station one evening for him to return, followed him a little, matched my pace to his long strides. I liked the way he walked – loping yet with purpose. I liked the way he brushed his hair back from his forehead, the tip-tap of his brogues on the pavement, the pause at the traffic lights while he checked his phone, the whistle when he thrust his hands in his pockets to feel his keys as he approached his house, their house. Of course, she never greeted him at the door; Mark had stopped expecting that a long time ago.
