to do with you.’
‘Henry …’ I try to say. Speaking seems too difficult, as if I have forgotten how.
‘Don’t think about him.’ You sound angry. You look deeply into my eyes, so that I must close my own. ‘The Munch painting, I know you were thinking of us, imagining our being together. We both were.’
I am completely floppy. I feel as though I am made of waves. I am slipping backwards. All I want is to lie down. There is a rushing in my head, like the sea. There is a pounding in my ears like a drum beat, my own heart, growing louder.
Your hands are on my waist, on my stomach, on my hips, on the small of my back, moving over me as you unfasten my wrap dress.
I only ever meant for Henry to touch this dress. I made it for the birthday dinner I had with him seven months ago. Even though we both knew it was all but over, he didn’t want me to turn thirty-eight alone. Our last night together. A goodbye dinner, with goodbye sex. This dress was never meant for you.
I am trying to push you away but I might as well be a child. You are pulling the dress the rest of the way open and sliding it off my shoulders. And then the room tips, and everything that follows is shadowy. Broken images from a nightmare I don’t want to remember.
She was so immersed in writing that the rasp of the jury officer’s microphone startled the pen from her fingers, making it shoot across the quiet area where she was sitting. ‘Will the following people please come and stand by the desk for the trial that is about to begin in Court 12?’ Her name was the first to be called, giving her an electric shock. She shoved the notebook into her bag as if it were a piece of incriminating evidence she didn’t want to be seen with.
Two minutes later she was hurrying after the usher with the others. A heavy door sprang open and they were in the hidden depths of the building, winding their way up several flights of draughty concrete stairs, padding across the linoleum of a small, overly bright waiting room, then stumbling through another door. She blinked several times as she realised that they were in the courtroom. Her name was called again and she filed into the back row.
Henry would have refused the Bible but Clarissa took it from the usher without wavering. She meant every word of the oath, though her voice was faint.
Sitting next to her was a prettily plump, dark-haired woman whose necklace spelled her name in letters of white gold: Annie. As if through a haze, Clarissa glanced farther to the right, where five defendants sat only a few feet away, flanked by police guards. Annie was studying the men with undisguised interest, as if daring them to notice.
The judge addressed the jurors. ‘This trial will last for seven weeks.’
Seven weeks. She’d never dreamed she’d be that lucky.
‘If there are compelling reasons as to why you cannot serve on this jury, please pass a note to the usher before leaving. Tomorrow the Crown will make his opening remarks.’
She groped for her bag, tugged down her skirt as she stood to make sure it hadn’t ridden up, and lurched after the others. As she passed the dock she saw that if she and the nearest defendant were each to stretch out an arm, they would almost be able to touch.
She squirmed off her mittens as she boarded the train, found the last empty seat, and took out her mobile. A sick wave went through her. Four texts. One from her mother. The others from Rafe. It was actually restrained for him, stopping at three.
She didn’t smile, as she normally would, when she read her mother’s – Coffee is not a breakfast food. Nothing could inure her to his little series, however harmless they might seem to somebody else.
Hope you’re sleeping. Hope you’re dreaming of me.
Keep getting your voicemail. Will phone later.
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