You’ll need juice and fruit and things with vitamins. I’ll come to your flat.
She wanted a friend to turn to, to show the texts to; she wanted a friend to tell her what to do. She used to have friends before Henry and fertility treatments took over her life; before she let a married man leave his wife for her; before other women stopped trusting her; before she found it too hard to look at their disapproving faces and see her own bewilderment at what she’d done mirrored in them.
Henry and her friends wouldn’t mix, but she still should have found a way to obey that cardinal rule, the one that says you should never let a relationship interfere with your friends. Now Henry was gone, and Clarissa was too abashed to try to get her friends back. She wasn’t even sure she deserved them, or that they’d ever forgive her.
She thought of her oldest friend, Rowena, whom she hadn’t seen for two years. Their mothers had met in the maternity ward, cradling their new babies as they gazed at the sea from the hospital’s top-floor windows. There’d been play dates in infancy and toddlerhood. They’d gone all through school together. But Rowena was another friend who didn’t get along with Henry. She and Rowena had grown so different, though; perhaps Henry only hastened a breach that would have happened anyway.
She tried to shake away the self-pity. She would need to try harder to make new friends. And if she didn’t have friends to consult at the moment, at least she had the helplines; their information leaflets had arrived in the post on Saturday, just one day after she first spoke to them.
She texted him back. Don’t come. Don’t want to see you. Very contagious.
As soon as she pressed send she regretted it, remembering the advice every one of those leaflets repeated in countless ways. Wherever possible, do not talk to him. Do not engage in any kind of conversation. She knew her lost friends would have said that too.
She wished she hadn’t given him her mobile number. Nothing else had worked to get rid of him the morning after his book launch party. Not being audibly sick in the bathroom. Not swallowing three painkillers right before his eyes for her throbbing head. Not even her visible trembling made him see she was so unwell he needed to go. The number had been a last-resort payoff to get him to leave – if only she’d had the foresight to make up a fake number instead of using her real one to fob him off. But she’d been too ill to think clearly.
She dialled Gary. Compelling reasons, the judge had said. What might these be? Pregnancy, perhaps. Or breastfeeding. She had no compelling reasons. A line manager who would be mildly inconvenienced by her absence was not a compelling reason.
Clarissa tried to sound sorrowful and as if something shocking had been done to her. ‘I thought it would only be nine days. Two weeks at most. That’s what all the stuff they sent us says, but I somehow got picked for a seven-week trial. I’m so sorry.’
‘Didn’t they give you a chance to say you couldn’t? You’re vital to this university.’
She couldn’t help but laugh. ‘I’m not. Not like doctors or teachers. Even they don’t get out of it. Even judges don’t. The secretary to the Head of the Graduate School is hardly a key worker – though of course I’m touched by your unique sense of my importance.’
‘But you didn’t answer my question.’ On rare occasions Gary could muster a serious boss tone with her. ‘Didn’t they give you a chance to get out of it?’
She felt no qualms about the lie. ‘No,’ she said. She was home; the train was pulling into Bath. Her skin prickled, usually an unfailing warning that she was being watched, but she knew Rafe wasn’t in the carriage. She couldn’t see him on the platform either. ‘No, they didn’t.’
The traffic fumes were making her eyes burn. She was walking from Bristol Temple Meads station to the court and the roads were so wide and alike she wondered if she was lost.
She was trying to concentrate on the route, the barely known landmarks – she was sure she remembered that purple wall to her right from yesterday – but Rafe was crowding out everything else, as usual.
Friday, 30 January, 10.00 a.m. (Four Days Ago)
It is my last day at work before jury service; my last day of having to avert you. On Monday I will disappear into the court building and you will not know where I am.
I place my documents and reports on one of the fixed wooden chairs in the large lecture theatre and my bag on another. I take the seat between them, hoping these small battlements will deter you from sitting beside me. Such a visual signal of my wish for space would work with anyone else. But not with you. Of course not with you. Nothing works with you.
You are standing over me and saying ‘Hello, Clarissa’ as you move my papers onto the floor and sit down. I’m unfairly, irrationally furious with Gary, for insisting that I attend this meeting in his place. You are in the aisle seat, making escape more difficult – I’d been foolish not to see that coming.
You lock your eyes on me, your eyeballs quivering. There is nowhere to hide from your eyes. I want to put my face in my hands, to cover myself. Your cheeks flash crimson, then white, then crimson again with the sharpness of a car’s indicators. I hate to see such clear evidence of my effect on your body.
And your effect on mine. I am growing hot and my chest hurts so much I fear I will stop breathing. I might faint in front of everybody, or be sick. It must be a panic attack.
The ceiling is high. The fluorescent lights are speckled with desiccated fly corpses. Though the bulbs are far above my head, they burn into the top of my skull. Even in winter the flies survive in the building’s warm roof space. I can hear one hissing and frying, unable to escape the trap of the lamp in which it has found itself. I fear it will fall on me. But better a fly than you.
You touch my arm and I shrink away with as little violence as I can manage. You whisper, ‘You know I love your hair that way, off your neck. Your neck is so lovely, Clarissa. You did it for me, didn’t you? And the dress too. You know how I love you in black.’
And I just can’t bear it any more. As if the top has blown off a pressure cooker I jump up, abandoning my papers, tripping over your feet and legs. You take advantage – of course you do, you always do – and put your hands on my waist in a pretence of helping to balance me. I slap your fingers away, beyond caring whether I affront the Vice Chancellor, who pauses in his opening remarks as all the heads in the room turn to watch me rush out. It makes me want to cry, knowing that it appears as if I’m the one out of control, rather than you.
Somehow I flee the campus and get myself into the centre of Bath and stumble along my near-automatic walk to the Assembly Rooms. I don’t follow my usual descent into the dimly lit basement, my favourite place, where they display gowns from hundreds of years ago; they are spun of silver and gold, brocaded in shimmering silks, embellished with jewels. Instead, I walk straight through the sage-green entrance hall, between marbled columns the colour of pale honey, and stop just outside the Great Octagon.
The room is closed. A sign explains that a private function will be taking place in it later today. But I slip between the double doors as if I have a right to, and close them behind me. It is hushed
