it, I tell myself. Don’t go there. After my scare at the library, I’ve resolved to put a lid on my curiosity. The man was a journalist, I know it. By now he will have reported back to London, to some ravenous editor in an office on Southwark Street, a woman not unlike Natasha, polished and cutthroat, with the toothpaste-white smile of an angel but with a dagger concealed in her silk blouse. The woman will be celebrating, kicking off her heels, opening a chilled bottle of wine… But she won’t tell anyone, not yet, this story is too hot and too precious. Just for tonight, it’s hers alone. The story of the year: a tale of seduction, betrayal and murder.
And love…
I can’t risk meeting the same fate as my predecessor. I can’t risk being sent home. Right now, the Barbarossa is the only protection I have.
Yesterday, I overheard Vivien in conversation, presumably with Adalina. I was outside, clearing the rain-clogged gutters of leaves, head bent against the downpour, when from an open window I detected her voice. ‘You mean you really can’t see it?’ I fought to catch Adalina’s response over the spit of drops bouncing off the veranda roof, but what followed from Vivien filled the blanks. ‘God, woman, it’s unmistakeable. It’s like looking at a photograph. She’s too like her; I can’t bear it…’
Too like whom? Who was Vivien talking about?
I had to get Vivien on side. For as long as I was here, secluded in these hills, I was safe. She had succeeded for years in hiding from the world. Why couldn’t I do the same? I’m used to hiding, after all. Those years I spent at home caring for my broken family – maybe they were as much for me as for them. I needed to be closeted away. I needed to be forgotten.
Adalina appears at the study door.
‘It was for you,’ she says.
‘What was?’
‘The telephone.’
I’m startled. I haven’t given this number to anyone, not even Bill.
‘Who was it?’
‘They did not say. They only asked for Lucy. I told them to leave a message.’ She frowns. ‘And they hung up.’ Adalina is clearly annoyed, though at the distraction to her busy day or by her suspicion that I’m spreading Vivien Lockhart’s personal contact details all over Europe it’s hard to know. ‘They sounded… impatient.’
Fear scatters through me, and I ask: ‘Was it a man or a woman?’
‘A woman.’
The slice of hope that it might have been him (never mind the fact he has no clue that I’m in Italy and, even if he did, wouldn’t be able to track me down: love makes us believe in the impossible) is pinched out. ‘A woman?’ I repeat.
‘Please tell your friends not to call the house in future.’
‘It can’t have been a friend. Nobody knows this number.’
Adalina doesn’t buy it. Just tell them, her expression says, before she leaves.
I listen to my breath for a moment, fast and short.
I’ve been found.
*
I return to the library that evening, only this time I’m not chasing Vivien’s story. I’m chasing my own – and I have to reach it before someone else does.
I have to make contact with him. Now the time is here, now it’s happening, I feel strangely calm. All the things I’ve rehearsed to say go out of the window.
I take a breath and begin. Compose message.
So, here I am. It’s been a while. I never thought it would be so long, and longer still when every moment hurts. I’m sorry. That’s the first thing to say. I’m sorry for what happened.
The cursor blinks. I delete what I’ve written and start again.
I have a question, and it’s this. Am I bad? Am I evil? Tell me, because I don’t know. My crime is that I fell in love with a man who told me he was single. You told me you were single. I fell in love with your laugh and your hands and the gentle frown you wear when you are concentrating. I fell in love with adventure, with excitement. I fell in love with the girl you promised me I was: the girl I’d always wanted to be.
My fingers hover over the keys. When words aren’t enough, what then?
I remember the day we met. He interviewed me for the role, and all I could think of right the way through was a line from the job description: The position of PA requires you to work intimately with the director. Here he was. Intimately.
He’d been cool, calm, everything I wasn’t. Steel-grey eyes, burning in some lights, thawed in others; a sharp, square jaw; messy gold hair. I kept seeing those eyes. I see them now. Where absence forces other details to fail, that one never does. I’ve looked into them too many times. They’ve looked into me.
I was shocked by the revelation he was married, ready to walk. Don’t, he said. They were estranged. There were children but he barely saw them; his wife was with someone new, a man they called Daddy. It broke his heart. I loved him more.
Had I really been that stereotype?
Had I really been the mistress who waits, hands wringing, for a break-up?
Divorce was impossible, he promised. He was an important man, and his wife was Grace Calloway, a well-known TV personality. I was taken in by the glamour – my life had been anything but glamour up to that point. How beautiful she was, how celebrated, and yet he chose to spend his nights with me. It’s fake, he told me, none of it’s real. I clung to that. He needed me. I kept him going. Kept him sane.
The nights without him were the worst. I’d lie in bed, picturing him in a home that didn’t welcome him, his wife away with her lover, his children refusing to let him close. It was easier to imagine than the alternative. That maybe they had made up; maybe she had cooked him a meal (saltimbocca, his favourite) and they’d shared a bottle of Chianti (like the one we had in that cosy Italian under London Bridge on my birthday, where the bottles came in cork baskets with molten wax down their sides), and then she’d told him she wanted to try again. The children were what got him. He could never turn his back on them, nor should he even think of it.
I erase what I’ve written. This is what I mean to say:
Right in that moment before she died, James, she looked at me and I knew. I knew that she loved you. I knew that you were never estranged and that you were happy – at least as far as she was concerned. She was a fragile, injured woman, a wife and a mother, and I had done a terrible, terrible thing.
I wish you would talk to me. I wish you would call. I wish you would tell me that I’m wrong about all this. You loved me then and you love me now and you didn’t lie to me.
Where are you? I cannot do this alone.
Someone is watching. Someone is here.
What should I tell them? What should I say? How can I know, if you won’t talk to me?
Bill’s
