Seven Lies Page 2

  That was the beginning of it, the most exciting part probably. Soon, her audience began to expand rapidly. At the request of her online followers, she started recording her own cookery videos. She accepted sponsorship from a high-end kitchenware company, who filled our flat with cast-iron pans and pastel ramekins and more utensils than two people could ever possibly need. She was offered a regular column in a newspaper. But at first it was just us, flicking through the free magazines to find the latest new places to visit.

  I think you can tell a lot about a relationship by the way two people dine together in public. Marnie and I loved to watch as couples entered hand in hand, groups of men in tailored suits grew louder and louder, expanding to fill the available space, the illicit affair, the anniversary meal, the very first date. We liked to read the room, to guess the pasts and predict the futures of the other patrons, telling stories of their lives that we hoped might be true.

  If you had been one of those other customers, sitting at one of those other tables, playing that same game and watching us instead, you would have seen two young women, one tall and fair, one shrunken and dark, entirely comfortable in each other’s company. I think you might have known that we enjoyed a friendship with strong branches and coiled roots. You would have seen Marnie—without thinking, without asking, without needing to—reach over to take the tomatoes from my plate. You might have seen me, in response, take the slithers of pickle or slices of cucumber from hers.

  But Marnie and I haven’t dined alone in three years, not since she moved in with Charles. We are never so at ease now as we were back then. Our worlds are no longer entwined. I am now an intermittent guest in the story of her life. Our friendship is no longer its own independent thing, but a skin tag, a protrusion that subsists within another love.

  I did not think then—and I do not think now—that Marnie and Charles had a love greater than ours. And yet I understood implicitly that their love—a romantic love—would and must subsume ours. Even though our love—one that flourished strolling shoulder to shoulder down school corridors, on buses to day-trip destinations, on sleepovers—seemed so much more deserving of a lifetime together.

  Every Friday, at around eleven in the evening when I left their flat, I found myself saying goodbye to a love that had shaped me, defined me, decided me. It always felt so cruel to be both within it and without it all at once.

  And a truth that I knew then—and one that I still cannot fully comprehend—is that, crueler still, it was a situation entirely of my own making. I am wholly responsible for that first detached limb, for that first broken bone, for that first forgotten memory.

  Chapter Three

  Three months after I met Jonathan, I moved to live with him in his maisonette in Islington. We were young, yes, but we were completely, utterly, entirely in love. It was unexpectedly easy, in a way that something new rarely is. It was lively and exciting, in a way that my simple life rarely was. I had loved living with Marnie—I had been happy—and yet eventually I began to crave something more, something other.

  I had spent most of my childhood in a home that seemed loving from the outside but consistently failed to deliver on that promise. My parents were twenty-five years married before they divorced. But they should have separated much sooner, because their squabbling and bickering made our family home intolerable.

  The short version is that my father was a philanderer. He had a twenty-year affair with his secretary, and there were many other women who danced in and out of his affections over the course of my parents’ marriage. My sister was four years younger, and so I did what I could to protect her from the noise and the drama and the tension. I took her out and turned the music up and was forever distracting her with promises of something interesting somewhere else. But I suppose that’s another story for another time. What I mean to say is that I—perhaps more than most—was susceptible to the ideals of a romantic love. I adored Marnie. But this new love consumed me completely.

  Jonathan and I met on Oxford Street when we were both twenty-two years old. It was six in the evening and we were heading to our respective homes at opposite poles of the city. The station entrances were gated, as they so often are, due to overcrowding on the platforms. The sky was dark, threatening rain, and thick gray clouds passed quickly over our heads.

  Jonathan and I—unbeknownst to each other—were both enmeshed in the crowd queuing to enter the ticket hall. The throng felt like its own person, with its own consciousness, an impatient desire to be anywhere else emanating from us as one. I could feel other bodies invading my own: arms squeezed against mine, thigh on thigh in a way that seemed far too familiar, someone’s chest forced against the back of my head. We were pressed together so tightly that I couldn’t see beyond the back of the man standing in front of me.

  Eventually there was a clanging, metal on metal, somewhere up ahead as the gates were opened from the inside. The crowd began to vibrate, everyone readying themselves. The man in front of me—blocking my view—leaned forward and then, as I stepped into his empty space, he staggered back. He bumped into me and I into the person behind. The two sides of the crowd shuffled forward steadily as we, there in the center, sent a surge, a rolling wave, pushing the middle in the wrong direction.

  “What the . . . ?” I said, regaining my balance.

  “You . . .” he said, turning to face me.

  I knew. As I had with Marnie. Immediately, I knew. It sounds so stupid, so naive, I know. People have levied that criticism against me hundreds of times—when I moved in with him, when I agreed to marry him, even on the eve of our wedding. And all I could say in response to them then and all I can say to you now is that I hope one day you know, too.

  I suppose that it was different with Marnie. We were both looking for someone. The next seven years at that school were stretching out in front of us and neither one of us wanted to live that alone. The joy we felt at finding each other was heightened by an overwhelming sense of relief.

  Whereas with Jonathan . . . I don’t know. I had never felt like the sort of woman who would fall in love in that way. And so there was no want, no empty space, no something that needed substantiating. I simply saw him and I knew instinctively that I needed to know him better. I could tell you how it felt with words that over the decades have become synonymous with great love, but those truisms were never true for me. The world didn’t fall away beneath my feet; instead I felt solid and substantial in a way that I never had before. There were no trembling hands, no quivering hearts, no faces flushed with pink. There were no butterflies. There was simply the sense that he felt, for me, like the home I’d always needed but never really known.

  “You . . .” I said, straightening the lapels of my coat. His eyes were olive green, and as he stared at me, bewildered, I felt this inappropriate urge to lift my palm to his cheek. “You just—”

  “My scarf,” he said, gesturing toward the floor. “You stood on my scarf.”

  “I did no such—” I looked down. I was still standing on the tassels of his navy scarf. “Oh,” I said, quickly stepping aside. “Sorry.”

  “You want to fucking get on with it,” came a voice from behind us, loud and gruff, the voice of the crowd.

  “Yes, right,” he said, turning around. “Sorry.”

  He began to shuffle forward and I followed, smiling in an inane, vacuous way, my face still pressed tightly between his shoulder blades. We stayed like that, forced together, through the ticket hall, down the escalator, and toward the platforms. At some point we began talking. And I couldn’t tell you now what it was that we said, but when it was time to separate, he to go north and I to go south, we were squabbling both about the scarf and about a pub that he said didn’t exist.

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “I’ve been there dozens of times. I could take you there right now.”

  “Okay,” he replied.

  People were r
ushing around, filtering into two streams, one on either side of us, and dispersing onto the platforms.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Let’s go,” he replied.

  The pub did exist, as I’d said it would: a traditional wood-paneled, almost medieval hideaway with low ceilings and an open fire. It was—and still is, although I haven’t been there in years—called The Windsor Castle. It’s ten minutes from Oxford Circus and tucked down a narrow cobbled street, a welcome nod to an older version of the city that stood long before the towering flagship stores and coffee shops that repeat every hundred yards.

  We stayed there for hours, until the landlady rang her bell for last orders, when we trundled back to the ticket hall, now almost empty, and said our goodbyes with kisses—which were entirely out of character—and promises of next time. I felt something shift inside me when he lifted his hands from my hips. As I watched him walk away from me, his dark green coat flapping at his thighs, I knew that I loved him already.

  That love was the foundation on which I would have—could have—built a life. There is a version of this world in which Jonathan and I are still together, still smitten. We promised each other an unyielding love, a life that celebrated laughter and a bond that would never for a moment waver. It is sometimes impossible to believe that we failed to deliver on something that once seemed so certain.

  He asked me to marry him a year later—to the day—in that very same pub. He knelt awkwardly on one knee and told me that he’d planned a speech, he’d learned it by heart, but that he couldn’t remember a single word he’d wanted to say. But he’d love me for as long as he lived, he said, if that was enough for now.

  I thought it was more than enough for me.

  We were married that autumn in a registry office. We had no guests and we celebrated with the most expensive champagne that the nearest off-license stocked. We went to The Windsor Castle for our wedding breakfast. It felt only right that it should be the headquarters for all the major milestones of our relationship. I placed our order at the bar, carefully enunciating as I declared that my husband would like a burger. The bartender rolled her eyes but smiled, vaguely amused by this young bride in a pale blue dress and her groom in a green tie. Our desserts—brownies accompanied by vanilla ice cream—were served with Congratulations written in chocolate icing around the rim of each plate.

  We wheeled our bags to Waterloo and caught the train down to the south coast to stay in a small bed-and-breakfast in a seaside town called Beer. We arrived late that evening and checked in, announcing in the way that only newlyweds do that the room was booked for Mr. and Mrs. Black.

  “For Jane?” said the elderly woman managing the front desk. It was nearly ten o’clock and she was clearly keen that we recognize the inconvenience.

  “Yes,” I replied. “For Jane Black.” She could say whatever she liked, do whatever she wanted, and none of it could even begin to scratch at the edges of my happiness.

  “Upstairs, end of the corridor, on the right.” She held out a small gold key attached by a thin gold chain to a thick wooden slab engraved with the word four. “Anything else?”

  We shook our heads.

  Jonathan carried our bags upstairs, down the hallway, and into our room. The floorboards were dark wood and the bedspread embroidered with small pastel flowers. The curtains—the color of rust—had been drawn closed and a small pink lampshade shone softly in the corner. A miniature bottle of champagne had been left in an ice bucket on an old-fashioned mahogany desk. He popped the cork and poured two glasses, and we toasted our wedding a second time.

  * * *

  We woke the following morning as the sun rose and speckled our bedspread yellow and orange. I remember the warmth of his chest against my back as he bent himself around me, the soft skin of his palm smoothing my stomach and his lips against my shoulder blade. I remember how it felt to be enveloped by him, to be wrapped so safely inside someone else, and the way his hands would turn me toward him, his kisses would shift and solidify, when he wanted something more.

  It was only later, when there was a knock at the door and a woman apologetically handed over the towels that should have been left in the bathroom, that we scrambled from the bed and made a plan for the day. I pulled back the curtains and looked out at the sea. It was flattened across the horizon and bordered on either side by white cliffs topped with thick green grass. It was October and yet the sky was bright, cloudless, welcoming.

  We pulled on our walking boots and our thick woolen jumpers.

  Outside, the beach was pebbled. I started along the path toward it, toward the sea, toward the waves that rolled inward, collapsing against the shore.

  “This way,” called Jonathan, pointing upward instead at the cliffs above. “I think we should go this way.”

  And so we climbed the road, marching along the pavement, past parked cars and curtained windows, until we reached a grassy verge with signs about hours and bank holidays and a small ticket machine.

  “Let’s keep going,” said Jonathan, weaving through the few parked vans and across the grass.

  From then, we walked in silence, sometimes hand in hand, sometimes he was in front and I behind, getting distracted by something and then rushing to catch up.

  He was always so focused, particularly outdoors, always there with his camera, wanting to see what was farther on, around a corner, what might be waiting for him ahead. For me, it was simply wonderful to be so isolated, nothing to hear but the sea crashing against the rocks beneath and the squawk of gulls overhead.

  After an hour or so, we approached another seaside village, smaller than Beer, it seemed, but with a car park, a tiny building that housed a few public toilets, and a café with a thatched roof.

  “Perhaps it’s open,” said Jonathan, and because Jonathan was with me, it was.

  He ordered a mug of coffee for himself and, for me, a glass of cold orange juice. We sat outside on the picnic benches and watched the sea as we waited for our bacon sandwiches. Fishermen were huddled together, protecting one another from the wind. I imagined them discussing their catch, the price of cod, their plans for the rest of the day.

  After breakfast, we wandered along the beach, the waves swimming in and out, licking at the crevices in each stone and at the soles of our boots. Jonathan spotted a small cutaway in the overgrowth at the foot of the cliff and insisted that we explore further. We pierced the dense shrubs, stepping away from the coast into a forest and zigzagging through thorn bushes and nettles on a narrow mud-pressed path. We climbed higher and higher and still the cliffs were towering above us.

  After ten, maybe fifteen minutes, we reached a fork in the trail; the left had steps carved into the slope, the right had a thin path on the very edge of an overhang.

  “Let’s try this,” said Jonathan, pointing up and to our right.

  “I don’t think so,” I replied.

  He had spent his childhood in the countryside, been raised in mud and hay and knee-high grass. But I wasn’t comfortable in that world. I was mesmerized by the views and the sounds and the endless space, but I felt like an interloper, uneasy and unwelcome.

  “This looks safer,” I said, gesturing left.

  “Come on,” he said, and he smiled. “You’ll be fine.”

  I hesitated. But I was tempted, encouraged by his faith in me, his certainty. I found it so difficult to deny him whatever it was that he wanted. Truthfully? I’d have done almost anything he asked.

  I unfurled my fists, stretched out my fingers, and stepped one foot toward him, onto the small lip that jutted out from the rocks.

  He stepped backward—so easily, so agile—like a funambulist balancing on a tightrope.

  “There you go,” he said. “You’re doing great.”

  The shelf was narrow, less than a foot in width. It was impossible to stand with two feet side by side.

  “Ta
ke another step,” he said.

  I heard our future in that moment: Jonathan talking to a child, encouraging him, too. The memory of it, something that hadn’t yet happened, settled within me and it made me feel bolder.

  “What are you waiting for? Keep going,” he insisted. “I’ve got you.”

  I lifted my back leg and slowly swung it forward, over the sea below. Finally, my foot found purchase on the ledge and I exhaled.

  “What now?” I asked. I had twisted, somehow facing the cliff, my chest pressed against it, the backs of my heels resting only on air. “How are you doing this?”

  “You can walk normally,” he said. “Or just shuffle along. Try not to overthink it.”

  I looked up at him just a few steps ahead. He grinned at me, the beginnings of wrinkles creasing around his eyes and dimples pressing into his cheeks. His hand was stretched out toward me reassuringly, the ring on his finger glinting in the sun. His other hand was holding on to a ridge above us, and I could see a strip of his hip where his T-shirt had lifted from his trousers.

  I leaned toward him. But then my back foot slipped and I remember the feeling of dipping, my weight falling down to one side. I remember the air sucked into my lungs, my fingers skimming the rock face, the panic that streamed through me. I felt his hand slam into my back as he pushed me firmly against the rocks and my chin grazed the sharp surface of cliff.

  “You’re fine,” he said. “You’re okay.”

  “No,” I said. “This isn’t safe. We shouldn’t be here.”

  My face was stinging and my knees aching from the impact.

  “You’re fine,” he said. “I promise. You’re okay.”

  I shook my head vigorously.