Famous Last Words, page 26
Viv is in full off-duty mode. Bare feet, two toe rings on. The hammered silver catches and fragments the sun into thrown diamonds across the front path. He can’t stop looking at those bare feet. Pink polish. She’s wearing an oversized white something—he doesn’t know the term, but it’s the kind of thing you’d throw on over a swimming costume on holiday. It comes to her slender mid-thighs. She has what he knows will be a Chablis in her left hand. She stands on one foot, the other rubbing her ankle as she looks up, perplexed, at him.
“I’m on my way somewhere,” he explains. “Thought I’d call in.”
Viv blinks, evidently surprised, which is not at all the emotion Niall intended to evoke. “Where?” she says blankly.
“Quarter of a mile away, on a job.”
“Rather you than me,” she says, still standing partially blocking the doorway. “When are you due there?” she asks, as sharp a negotiator as anyone Niall has trained up.
He dodges the question. “I wondered if I might say something to you.”
She glances over her shoulder, just once, but Niall clocks it immediately. “Is somebody here?” he says.
Viv raises her eyes heavenward, saying nothing, but she turns away from him, heading inside, and he takes this as an invitation. He walks through her hallway, living room on the right, kitchen on the left, and out into the back garden. Nobody here except the old cat he saw the other day, and a second one with one eye.
“New cats?”
“New old cats. Owner died,” she says.
It’s nothing like their place in Central London. Viv moved here seven years ago, into rented, which is at least temporary, which keeps Niall’s hope alive.
“Drink?” she says sharply, gesturing with her Chablis. The bottle’s sitting on a wrought-iron table he doesn’t recognize.
“This new?” he says, tapping it. She sits down heavily in the chair.
“Came with the house. Old tenants didn’t want it.”
He pauses in her garden, almost fully dark now, but still hot, humming with crickets that he’s sure weren’t in London a few years ago, and he tries to calm his mind, think about what Jess would say. He thinks she would say that it doesn’t matter whether he gets her back. Only that he says the right thing. His truth. The important thing. So that he is more able to live with himself. To move forward without her, to somebody new, whom he might treat better.
She pours him a glass and sits back. God, she still looks lovely. Just—lovely. Blond hair, no grays yet, lines on her forehead, sure, but they look kindly.
“Do you remember my siege case? In the London warehouse?” he says, and then takes a sip of the wine. It explodes in his mouth—she always picked good wine. Cold, as clean and fresh as a bite of an apple that comes away in one neat slice. It slivers down his throat and zings through his bloodstream. Let her offer him another, let him be over the limit, let him have to stay . . .
“Obviously,” she says, the word loaded. Viv crosses her feet on the empty chair opposite her and next to Niall, and the case goes clean out of his mind: suddenly, all Niall can think about is those bare feet.
“Well, I wanted to say I’m sorry. That case has reared its head again and—well. So have . . . other events of that night.”
“Like?” she says, voice as sharp as the wine.
“Like me being a shit husband.”
She blinks, perhaps surprised. She looks at her feet for a few seconds, twitching her toes back and forth, evidently thinking. “I didn’t expect that,” she says. “It was always that you’d done nothing wrong. That you had to work.”
“I see now that I was single-minded. Am. And I know it wasn’t about the birthday.”
“The bloody birthday was the final straw.”
She rises from her chair just slightly, tucks the foot with the toe rings on underneath her, and resettles herself like a contented cat.
“It was seven years ago, Niall.”
“I haven’t forgotten another birthday since.”
“I know that,” she says, but she says it gently.
“I heard you broke up with the American.”
“How do you know about that?” she says, and Niall can tell, now, immediately, that he’s lost her. She’s become testy with him, prickly body language. God, who was he kidding? It isn’t about being able to live with himself, not at all. Of course it’s about being with her. And then she adds, “Don’t call him that.”
“Rosalind told me,” he says.
Viv sighs, looks into the distance, then sips her wine. “He wasn’t for me,” she says flatly.
Because I am, Niall thinks, emboldened by the beautiful dark-green summer evening, the wine, and her.
“Niall,” she says, her voice gentle, empathetic. Everything. He loves everything about her. That, later, she will drink two pots of tea right before bed and get up twice in the night to wee. Her mad rescue cats. How long she put up with him, despite everything. “You are obsessed with work,” she finishes, verbalizing what has gone unsaid.
“Yes.”
“You obsess over things generally,” she says. “You won’t change.”
“I know, and I’m trying—Viv, I really am—to work out how I might do both.”
“Do both?”
“Be with you—and with my job.”
She pauses for a long while, then reveals her truth to him. “I was your first obsession,” she says, and Niall can’t help but find that interesting, as well as upsetting.
“I see.”
“I was.”
“Look.” He takes a steadying breath. And here it is, his truth, communicated—he hopes—well. “I’m so sorry I didn’t put you first. It is the biggest regret of my life, in fact.” He’s chosen his words carefully, and Viv’s green eyes are immediately wet, but she doesn’t open her mouth; she clamps it tightly shut like a baby about to sob.
And he’s so vulnerable here. He had no idea this is how people feel when they’re telling the full, whole truth. “I’m so sorry. It was not fair on you.”
“Thank you for saying that,” she says tightly, bottom lip wobbling. She casts her gaze downward, long lashes fanning over her cheeks. The one-eyed cat ambles into the garden, bumps into the table.
“I’m sorry I didn’t before. If we were—if we were ever together again—it would be . . .”
“Don’t say that. But thank you.”
They lapse into a silence that might be companionable and might be a hopeless kind of closure. Ten minutes later, she sees him out.
Ten minutes after that, a work text comes through.
Claire: Text Anon has confirmed the coordinates were sent by an account linked to Deschamps’s email. I’ll leave it with you.
47
Anonymous Reporting on Camilla
“It’s stale,” I tell my brother. “I am really trying, but the information isn’t coming easily.”
“What have you tried?” he says.
We’re walking today. London moves and sways beneath a patchwork blue-and-white sky. The sun on the water, the tourist shops and the narrow alleyways. Funny how hardly anyone knows just how much crime is carrying on all around them.
“Been through her rubbish, even,” I say. “I don’t know if she’s just an excellent secret-keeper, or what.”
“This is taking a very long time,” he says, and it’s the kind of blended menacing and factual statement that everyone around him fears him making. “If she’s in contact with him, and we miss it . . .”
“I won’t miss it.”
“How much of the time are you on her tail?”
“As much as is possible.”
“She have any idea?”
“None.”
48
Cam
Cam is about to leave for a work-drinks event, but, first, is reading Adam’s novel jumpily on her sofa.
The thing nobody knew is that someone else was killed that night. And our killers are not the same person. Things in crime are never as simple as they seem. I was ordered by Dad to kill our dealer. And then someone else killed me.
A text comes in from Libby, who is going to have Polly for the night while Cam and Charlie go to the work event.
Libby: You left yet?
Cam: Almost.
Cam goes to put Adam’s book away.
It might be perhaps too dark, but it’s really good, and Cam has that feeling when you know you have a sale on the horizon. It’s a different genre, but it’s a good book, which is all that ought to matter. She reads a paragraph more:
The supplier killed me, and then a bystander pulled him off me, punched him. And, in doing so, threw him backwards, onto a street bollard which injured the back of his head.
He would’ve got away with it if he’d left then, but he didn’t: he came back. His conscience got him, the way it does with good people.
Cam shivers and puts it away. She needs to take Polly to Libby’s.
It’s a clear evening but cooler, and Cam can’t help but feel that autumn is beckoning its fingers to her and Polly, the breeze sharp. Libby’s house is white-rendered, its front covered in a shaggy honey monster of ivy, and Cam takes a second to stare at it, her sister’s life contained within.
As Cam watches, she feels a longing for something she can’t name. This happens all the time, and she sometimes wonders if it is for the other life that might have played out. A bigger house, then another, then another. A sibling for Polly. A lit-up orange window in a family home, a row of shoes at the entrance. Or maybe it’s not that, and it’s just something everybody feels.
“I shouldn’t be eating this,” Libby says, opening the door and gesturing to a Mars Bar in her hand. “Come on in,” she says to Polly.
“Can I have one?”
“No,” Cam says. “Dinner soon.”
“But . . . ?” Polly says, but is quickly distracted by Libby’s nursery-in-waiting upstairs, where she heads to play with the dollhouse. As Cam watches her daughter ascend the steps, the heels of her bare feet fuzzy peaches, she feels a dart of guilt at her self-sufficient daughter, the only child.
In Libby’s hallway, their eyes meet. “I suppose it doesn’t matter if I gain weight anymore. I can be as fat as I like,” Libby says.
“You’re never fat.”
“Yeah. Well. Anyway. I can do what I want,” Libby says.
“Oh?” Cam says, the topic opened, as it often is, at random, unexpected moments. Some people invite conversation, Libby drops it right in your lap.
“Doctor thinks I’m in peri—my levels are all dipping. I had a late period, was so excited I stopped drinking, but it was that.” Her voice is low. Just off the hallway, her downstairs shower is running, a rain-forest sound in the background. Beyond them, the TV hums on some house-hunting program Si was watching and left on. She looks directly at Cam. “Isn’t that just fucking typical? Early menopause, to top everything off.”
“I’m so sorry,” Cam says sincerely. She’s blindsided. Jesus. She can’t go now, can she? Just head to the drinks as planned. Sorry about your menopause and infertility. “I wish there was something I could do,” she says.
“Yeah, well,” Libby says. They lapse into silence.
“It never matters if you gain weight,” Cam eventually adds, and Libby shrugs equivocally. “For fertility treatment or otherwise.”
“I can’t do it anymore. You know?” she says. And they stand there in Libby’s hallway and Cam wishes they weren’t having a conversation this important in these circumstances. Snatched time. She wishes she had gone to the appointment with Libby. Been a better sister to her.
“I do know.”
“And everyone talks about—I don’t know. Other options, like they’re easy and simple, but they’re not.”
“Don’t listen to them,” Cam says. “Do what you want to do.”
Libby shrugs, then says, “Not everyone gets their happy ending, right?”
“Right,” Cam says softly. But something is bugging her, like a floater at the edge of her vision . . . something nagging . . . her mind imploring her to make some connection or other.
“Anyway.” Libby motions her inside, and Cam steps into her living room, unable to refuse. On a drinks caddy in the corner of Libby and Si’s living room is a vase of fake bright-pink flowers and a golden pineapple ornament. This cabinet changes seasonally. It will be a knitted pumpkin soon.
“I’m sorry about the hormones,” Cam says, and she is about to say she’s experienced the same, recently—a feeling of mounting anxiety, sometimes; feeling hot at night; periods late and early—but she doesn’t. Sometimes, you have to put aside your own feelings when someone else’s are worse, that’s all.
“Yeah. Me too.”
Cam can hear Polly’s footsteps above them.
“Weird to think this saga has been rumbling on since you had Polly, and she’s upstairs playing by herself,” Libby says. “You can achieve a lot in seven years, or nothing at all.”
“You have achieved a lot,” Cam says. And she doesn’t know whether it’s the right thing, but she says it anyway, “You tried really, really hard to have your baby.”
“I know,” Libby says.
“They would have been lucky to have you,” she says, and Libby reaches over to grasp her hand, just briefly.
Libby sits down on the sofa, gesturing for Cam to do the same. “I think I’ve been a bit of a bitch to you,” Libby says, looking directly at Cam.
“What?” Cam says, surprised.
“About everything. I don’t know. Giving up on IVF has—I don’t know. It’s made me feel like I can reflect.”
“I see.”
“I’m sorry. I know it wasn’t easy for you to just give up on Luke. I know I made it seem—like it should be simple, maybe.”
“You helped a lot, actually,” Cam says, which is a lie. The frantic decluttering was born out of wanting to move on, but she hasn’t actually done so. “You knew I needed to move on. You were right.” A second lie.
“I was harsh with you,” Libby says. She sinks back into the sofa, her arm slung along its back. “I was . . . well. Do you know something?” she says, and she laughs a little, but it isn’t a genuine laugh. It’s sardonic: darkness contained within it.
“What?” Cam says, wary, knowing she is not telling the whole truth to her sister and not wanting to receive the opposite in return, not ready to.
“I was expecting you to move on from what is a grief. But the truth is . . .”
“What?”
“I am so fucking jealous of you,” Libby says. “Infertility makes you just—so jealous. Some days, my whole body hurts with it. You know?”
“I know,” Cam says, watching her sister mess with a pale fluffy throw.
“I guess . . .” Libby continues. “It was—like, before Luke, you had everything.”
“Did I?” Cam says.
“Yeah.”
And Cam could argue that things are not always how they seem, that everyone has problems behind the scenes—that look how she and Luke ended up—but it would be the wrong thing to do. Doesn’t she know more than anyone that she really did have it all, if only for the briefest of moments? Nine sweet months, then gone.
“I wanted to hurt you,” Libby says. “I don’t know. I’m sorry. You had the great job and the baby.” On this last word, her voice cracks, and Cam fully feels it.
“I don’t think either of us has had a good hand,” she says truthfully, thinking she knows who she’d rather be: she’d choose this life every time, with Polly. And something about this realization helps her. Whatever happens, she’s still got her daughter, singing something tuneless upstairs to herself.
“Well, I’m sorry regardless,” Libby says. “You can talk to me about Luke. You can.”
“It’s fine,” Cam says, thinking, It’s not that simple.
“I wanted him not to come back,” Libby says. “At times. I’m sorry. Infertility—it really fucks you up. Makes you wish for bad things to happen to everyone all the time. Or maybe that’s just how I am.”
“It’s not you,” Cam says, truthfully this time. “I have wished for that a lot, too, over the years.” After all, who hasn’t sat and wished for bad things to happen to other people, beautiful people, successful people? It’s just that people don’t usually admit it, that’s all. “That’s just grief, I think,” she adds, hoping the use of this word might be held by her sister in the way that she intends it.
“I bet,” Libby says, and she scoots closer to Cam on the sofa. “You deserved better than cantankerous old me, in those years.”
“Likewise, I’m sure.” She hesitates, wanting to tell Libby she was jealous of her, too, but decides not to.
“And I know there are options,” Libby continues obliviously. “That’s what everyone says.”
“Have you thought about that?” Cam asks tentatively.
Libby goes to answer, but Polly interrupts, walking into the room, holding her hairbrush out. “Can my mane be brushed, before dinner?” she says. “It feels tangled.” For a second, Cam thinks she’s asking Libby, but she isn’t: she’s asking Cam, of course she is. Her mother. “What’re you talking about?” she asks, and, internally, Cam cringes.
“Well, why I don’t have any children, and what I’m going to do about that,” Libby says, her voice matter-of-fact.
Polly’s footsteps stop, her hand extended, frozen in the air, holding her hairbrush out, and Cam thinks about the power of honesty. About how they’ve tried to cover so much stuff up, but look: Isn’t it better to just be honest? Polly’s nearly eight, not two. She can handle more than Cam thinks.
“Oh,” she says slowly. “I see. I didn’t know you wanted to have children.”
“Very much.”
“Oh no,” Polly says, her expression verging on horrified.
“But do you know what?”
“What?”
