"Still," Clare said.
"Just kidding around," Tom said. He gave another wolfish grin, showing those unnaturally white teeth, and then lowered the muzzle and hooked the shotgun back on its pegs.
I slumped back against the sofa feeling the wave of adrenalin recede, and my fingers uncurl from their rigid fists. My hands were shaking.
"Ha f.u.c.king ha," Clare said. She was frowning like someone totally failing to see any funny side at all. "Next time you want to wave that thing around, can you make sure it"s not one of my friends on the sharp end?"
I shot her a grateful look and she rolled her eyes at me as if to say, "d.i.c.k".
"Sorry," Tom said mildly. "Like I said, just kidding, but I apologise if any offence was caused." He gave a mock bow in my direction.
"Right, scuse I," Flo said with another yawn. "I"d better make a start on supper."
"Want a hand?" Clare said, and Flo"s face lit up. Her smile was extraordinary it transformed her whole face.
"Really? I feel like you should be acting like the queen of the day."
"Nah, come on. I"ll chop or something."
She heaved herself up off the sofa and they left the room, Clare"s arm slung companionably round Flo"s shoulders. Tom looked after them, as they left.
"Funny couple, aren"t they?" he said as they left the room.
"What do you mean?" I said.
"I can"t quite fit the Clare I know together with Flo. They"re so ... different."
The remark shouldn"t have made sense, given that they were so physically similar, and both dressed in an almost identical uniform of grey stonewash jeans and stripey top. But I knew what he meant.
Nina stretched. "They"ve got one really important interest in common though."
"What"s that?"
"They both think Clare"s the centre of the f.u.c.king universe."
Tom snorted, and I tried not to laugh. Nina only looked sideways out of her glinting dark eyes, a little wry smile twitching at the corner of her mouth. Then she stretched, and shrugged, all in one fluid movement.
"Right. I might phone the old trouble and strife." She pulled out her mobile and then made a face. "No reception. How"s yours, Lee?"
Nora. But there was only so many times I could correct people without seeming obsessively controlling.
"I don"t know," I said, and felt in my pockets. "That"s odd. It"s not here. I"m sure I had it at the shooting range I remember checking Twitter. Maybe I left it in the car. I don"t think I"d have any reception either, though I haven"t had a bar since I got here. You got a bit of reception from our room earlier, didn"t you?"
"Yeah." Nina had picked up the phone receiver and was jiggling the cradle. "This one"s still out. OK. I"m going upstairs to hang off the balcony and try to get a bar or two. Maybe I can send a text."
"What"s so urgent?" Tom asked.
Nina shook her head. "Nothing. Just ... you know. I miss her."
"Fair play."
We both watched as she disappeared upstairs, long legs eating up the stairs two at a time. Tom sighed and stretched out on the couch.
"Are you not phoning Bruce?" I asked.
He shook his head. "To tell the truth we had a bit of a ... disagreement, let"s call it. Before I left."
"Oh right." I kept my voice neutral.
I never know what to say in these situations. I hate people prying into my business, so I a.s.sume others will feel the same way. But sometimes they want to spill, it seems, and then you look cold and odd, backing away from their confidences. I try to be completely non-judgemental not pushing for secrets, not repelling confessions. And in truth, although part of me really doesn"t want to hear their petty jealousies and weird obsessions, there"s another part of me that wants to egg them on. It"s that part of me that stands there nodding, taking notes, filing it all away. It"s like opening up the back of the machine to see the crude workings grinding away inside. There"s a disappointment in the ba.n.a.lity of what makes people tick, but at the same time, there"s a kind of fascination at seeing the inner coils and cogs.
The trouble is that the next day they almost invariably resent you for having seen them naked and unguarded. So I"m deliberately reserved and non-committal, trying not to lead them on. But somehow it doesn"t seem to work. All too often I end up pinned to the wall at parties, listening to a long tale of how so-and-so f.u.c.ked them over, and then he said this, and then she got off with him, and then his ex did that ...
You"d think people would be wary of spilling to a writer. You"d think they"d know that we"re essentially birds of carrion, picking over the corpses of dead affairs and forgotten arguments to recycle them in our work zombie reincarnations of their former selves, st.i.tched into a macabre new patchwork of our own devising.
Tom, if anyone, should have known that. But it didn"t stop him. He was speaking now, his voice a bored drawl that didn"t disguise the fact that he was clearly still angry with his husband. "... What you"ve got to understand is that Bruce gave James his first big chance, he directed him in Black Ties, White Lies back in ... G.o.d, what, we must be talking seven, eight years ago? And maybe I mean, I don"t know I never asked what went on, but Bruce wasn"t exactly renowned for his professional chast.i.ty. We weren"t together then of course. But naturally Bruce feels that James owes him a certain amount, and maybe equally naturally James feels that he doesn"t. I know that Bruce was pretty angry over the business with Coriala.n.u.s and the fact that Eamonn sided with James ... And then when those rumours got round about him and Richard, well, there was only one place those could have come from. Bruce swore he never sent that text to Clive."
He carried on, a stream of names and places that meant nothing to me, and plays that had only the sketchiest impression in my own cultural landscape. The politics flowed over me, but the point was clear: Bruce was angry with James and had a past with him of whatever kind. Bruce had not wanted Tom to come to this hen night. Tom had come.
"So anyway, f.u.c.k him," Tom said at last, dismissively. I wasn"t sure if he was talking about Bruce or James. He walked across to the sideboard where a cl.u.s.ter of bottles stood: gin, vodka, the pathetic remnants of last night"s tequila. "Want a drink? G&T?"
"No thanks. Well, maybe just a tonic water."
Tom nodded, went out for ice and limes, and then came back with two gla.s.ses.
"Bottoms up," he said, his face set in lines that made him look a good ten years older. I took a sip and coughed. Tonic there was, but also gin. I could have made a fuss, but Tom raised one eyebrow with such perfect comic timing that I could only laugh, and swallow.
"So tell me," he said, as he drained his own gla.s.s and went back for a refill, "what happened with you and James? What was last night about?"
I didn"t answer at first. I took another long sip of my drink, swallowing it slowly, thinking about what to say. My instinct was to shrug it off with a laugh, but he would get it out of Clare or Nina later. Better to be honest.
"James is ... was ..." I swirled the drink in my gla.s.s, the ice cubes c.h.i.n.king as I tried to think how to phrase it. "My ex," I said at last. It was true but so far from the whole truth that it felt almost like a lie. "We were together at school."
"At school?" Tom raised both eyebrows this time. "Good lord. Dark ages. Childhood sweethearts?"
"Yes, I guess so."
"But you"re friends now?"
What could I say? No, I haven"t seen him since the day he texted me.
No, I"ve never forgiven him for what he said, what he did.
No.
"I ... not exactly. We sort of lost touch."
There was a sudden silence, broken only by the sounds of Clare and Flo chatting next door, and the hiss of a shower upstairs. Nina must have given up on trying to phone Jess.
"So you met at school?" Tom asked.
"Sort of. We were in a play together ..." I said slowly. It was strange to be talking about this. You don"t bring it up much as an adult: how you got your heart broken for the first time. But Tom was the next best thing to an anonymous stranger. I was highly unlikely to meet him again after this weekend, and somehow telling him felt like a release. "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. I was Maggie and James was Brick. Ironic, really."
"Why ironic?" Tom said, puzzled. But I couldn"t answer. I was thinking of Maggie"s words in the last act of the play, about making the lie true. But I knew that, of all people, Tom would know what that meant if I quoted the line, he would know what Maggie was referring to.
Instead I swallowed and said, "Just ... ironic."
"Come on," he said and smiled, his tanned cheek crinkling. "You must have meant something."
I sighed. I wasn"t going to tell him the truth. Or not the truth I"d been thinking of. A different truth then.
"Well, I was supposed to be the understudy. Clare was cast as Maggie she was the lead in almost every play we ever did, right from primary school onwards."
"So what happened?"
"She got glandular fever. Missed a whole term of school. And I got pushed on stage." I was always the understudy. I had a good verbal memory and I was conscientious. I felt Tom looking at me, puzzled about where the irony in that lay.
"Ironic that she should have been the one to get together with him, and now she is? Is that what you mean?"
"No, not exactly ... It"s more just ironic given that I hate being looked at, being watched. And there I was in the main role. Maybe all writers prefer being behind the page to being on stage. What do you think?"
Tom didn"t answer. He only turned to look out of the great gla.s.s window, out into the forest, and I knew he was thinking of his remark the night before: of the stage. The audience. The watchers in the night.
After a moment I followed his gaze. It looked different to last night: someone had switched on the external security lights, and you could see the blank white lawn stretched out, a perfect unbroken snowy carpet, and the sentinel trees, their trunks bare and p.r.i.c.kly beneath the canopy. It should have made me feel better that you could see the blank, unspoilt canvas, visual evidence that we were alone, that whoever had disturbed the snow before had not come back. But somehow it was not rea.s.suring. It made it feel even more stage-like, like the floodlights that illuminate the stage, and cast the audience into a black mora.s.s beyond its golden pool, unseen watchers in the darkness.
For a moment I made myself shiver, imagining the myriad eyes of the night: foxes with their eyes glowing yellow in the lamplight, white-winged owls, frightened shrews. But the footsteps of this morning had not been animal. They had been very, very human.
"It"s stopped snowing," Tom said unnecessarily. "I must admit, I"m quite glad. I didn"t really fancy being snowed in here for days on end."
"Snowed in?" I said. "In November? Do you think that could really happen?"
"Oh, yes." Flo"s voice came from behind us, making me jump. She was carrying a tray of crisps and nuts, and clamped her tongue rather sweetly between her teeth as she set it carefully down on the table. "Happens all the time in January. It"s one of the reasons my aunt doesn"t really live here in winter. The lane gets impa.s.sable if you get a big dump. But it never snows as heavily in November, and I don"t think it"ll happen today. There"s no more forecast for tonight. And it looks pretty, doesn"t it?"
She straightened up, rubbing her back and we all stared out of the window at the black lowering trees and the white snow. It didn"t look pretty. It looked stark and unforgiving. But I didn"t say that. Instead I asked the question that had been nagging at me.
"Flo, I meant to ask, the footprints going out to the garage this morning was that you?"
"Footprints?" Flo looked puzzled. "What time?"
"Early. They were there when I got back from my run at about eightish. Maybe before, I didn"t look going out."
"It wasn"t me. Where did you say they were?"
"Between the garage and the side door of the house."
Flo frowned.
"No ... it definitely wasn"t me. How odd." She bit her lip for a moment and then said, "Look, if you don"t mind, I might just lock up now that way we won"t forget later."
"What do you mean? You think it could have been someone else? Someone from outside?"
Flo"s cheerful face looked suddenly uncomfortable. "Well, my aunt had a lot of trouble when she built this place there were a lot of planning objections, local people didn"t like the fact that it was a second home for a start, and there were quite a lot of complaints about the style of the build and the site."
"Don"t tell me," Tom drawled. "Native American ancient burial ground, right?"
Flo hit him with a paper towel and cracked a smile through her worry. "Nothing like that. The only thing buried round here are sheep as far as I know. But this is a protected area I"m not sure if it"s actually in the national park, but it"s near as makes no odds. It got through because it was extending an existing building an old croft-type place. But people said it wasn"t in the spirit of the original ... Anyway, to cut a long story short it burnt down halfway through construction and I think it was pretty much accepted that it was arson, although nothing was ever proved."
"Jesus!" Tom looked horrified. He glanced out of the window as though expecting to see flaming torches coming up the hill at any moment.
"I mean it was fine!" Flo rea.s.sured us. "It was mid-build so the place was empty, and actually it worked out really well for my aunt because the insurance was very good, so she ended up with a higher-spec build. And according to the original plans she had to keep a bit of the original croft in place, but that burnt to the ground so it meant she didn"t have to bother with that any more. Overall I"d say they did her a favour. But, you know, it kind of affected how she feels about the neighbours."
"Are there any neighbours?" Tom wanted to know.
"Oh yes. There"s a little cl.u.s.ter of houses about a mile through the forest that way." She pointed. "And a farm down the valley."
"You know-" I was thinking aloud "-what really creeps me out isn"t the footprints or not as such. It"s the fact that if it hadn"t have been for the snow, we"d never have known."
We looked out, contemplating the unbroken white carpet across the path to the forest. My own steps from the run that morning had been filled in, and now you would never have known a human foot had pa.s.sed. For a long moment we all stood in silence, thinking about that fact, thinking about all the times we could have been observed, completely unaware.
Flo walked to the window to try the latch. It was firmly locked.
"Good!" she said brightly. "I"m going to check the back door, and then I think we should stop all this gloomy talk and have another drink."
"Hear, hear," Tom said soberly. He picked up my empty gla.s.s and this time, when he poured me a double, I didn"t complain.
18.
WHEN I WENT up to change for dinner, I found Nina sitting on the bed, her head in her hands. She looked up as I came in, and her face was grey and pinched, her expression so different from her usual wry sarcasm that I did a double-take.
"Are you all right?"
"Yeah." She pushed her dark glossy hair back from her face and stood up. "I"m just ... ugh, I"m so fed up of being here. It feels like we"re back in school and I"m remembering everything I hated about myself back then. It"s like we"ve slipped back ten years, don"t you think?"
"I don"t know." I sat down on my own bed and pondered her words. Although I"d had very similar thoughts last night, in the light of day they felt unfair. The Clare I remembered from school wouldn"t have put up with Flo for a second or not unless she had some powerful motive. She would have nodded along with Flo"s dumber remarks, stringing her along into saying something painfully weird, at which point she would have stood back, pointed and laughed. I"d seen none of that cruelty this weekend. Instead I"d been impressed by her tolerance. It was clear that Flo was a damaged person in some way and I admired Clare"s compa.s.sion in trying to help her. I didn"t know if I could have put up with Flo for ten days, let alone ten years. Clare was obviously a bigger and a better person than I"d given her credit for.
"I think Clare"s changed a lot, actually," I said. "She seems a lot more ..." I stopped, searching for the right word. Maybe there wasn"t one. "She just seems kinder, I guess."
"People don"t change," Nina said bitterly. "They just get more punctilious about hiding their true selves."
I chewed my lip while I thought that over. Was it true? I had changed at least, I told myself I had. I was far more confident, more self-sufficient. All through school I"d relied on my friends for self-esteem and support, wanting to be one of a pack, wanting to fit in. At last I had learned that wasn"t possible and I"d been happier albeit more lonely ever since.
But perhaps Nina was right. Perhaps it was simply that I"d learned to hide the awkward, desperate-to-fit-in child that I had been. Perhaps the me I"d become was just a thin veneer, ready to be peeled painfully back.