第 35 页

“Chrissy,” she said. Her voice was quiet, measured. I thought I detected something in it, some new emotion. Fear. “Describe Ben to me.”

“What?”

“Describe him to me. Ben. What does he look like?”

“What about the fire?” I said. “Tell me about that.”

“There was no fire,” she said.

“But I wrote down that I remembered it,” I said. “A chip pan. The phone rang . . .”

“You must have been imagining it,” she said.

“But—”

I sensed her anxiety. “Chrissy! There was no fire. Not years ago. Ben would have told me. Now, describe Ben. What does he look like? Is he tall?”

“Not particularly.”

“Black hair?”

My mind went blank. “Yes. No. I don’t know. He’s beginning to go gray. He has a paunch, I think. Maybe not.” I stood up. “I need to see his photograph.”

I went back upstairs. They were there, pinned around the mirror. Me and my husband. Happy. Together.

“His hair looks kind of brown,” I said. I heard a car pull up outside the house.

“You’re sure?”

“Yes,” I said. The engine was switched off, the door slammed. A loud beep. I lowered my voice. “I think Ben’s home.”

“Shit,” said Claire. “Quick. Does he have a scar?”

“A scar?” I said. “Where?”

“On his face, Chrissy. A scar, across one cheek. He had an accident. Rock climbing.”

I scanned the photographs, choosing the one of me and my husband sitting at a breakfast table in our dressing gowns. In it, he was smiling happily and, apart from a hint of stubble, his cheeks were unblemished. Fear rushed to hit me.

I heard the front door open. A voice. “Christine! Darling! I’m home!”

“No,” I said. “No, he doesn’t.”

A sound. Somewhere between a gasp and a sigh.

“The man you’re living with,” Claire said. “I don’t know who it is. But it’s not Ben.”

Terror hits. I hear the toilet flush, but can do nothing but read on.

I don’t know what happened then. I cannot piece it together. Claire began talking, almost shouting. “Fuck!” she said, over and over. My mind was spinning with panic. I heard the front door shut, the click of the lock.

“I’m in the bathroom,” I shouted to the man who I had thought was my husband. My voice sounded cracked. Desperate. “I’ll be down in a minute.”

“I’ll come over,” said Claire. “I’m getting you out of there.”

“Everything okay, darling?” shouted the man who was not Ben. I heard his footsteps on the stairs and realized I had not locked the bathroom door. I lowered my voice.

“He’s here,” I said. “Come tomorrow. While he’s at work. I’ll pack my things. I’ll call you.”

“Shit,” she said. “Okay. But write in your journal. Write in it as soon as you can. Don’t forget.”

I thought of my journal, hidden in the closet. I must stay calm, I thought. I must pretend nothing is wrong, at least until I can get to it and write down the danger I am in.

“Help me,” I said. “Help me.”

I ended the call as he pushed open the bathroom door.

It ends there. Frantic, I riffle the last few pages, but they are blank, scored only with their faint blue lines. Waiting for the rest of my story. But there is no more. Ben had found the journal, removed the pages, and Claire had not come for me. When Dr. Nash collected the journal—on Tuesday, it must have been—I had not known anything was wrong.

In a single rush, I see it all, realize why the board in the kitchen so disturbed me. The handwriting. Its neat, even capitals looked totally different from the scrawl of the letter Claire had given me. Somewhere, deep down, I had known then that they were not written by the same person.

I look up. Ben, or the man pretending to be Ben, has come out of the shower. He is standing in the doorway, dressed as he was before, looking at me. I don’t know how long he has been there, watching me read. His eyes hold nothing more than a sort of vacant emptiness, as if he is barely interested in what he is seeing, as if it doesn’t concern him.

I hear myself gasp. I drop the papers. Unbound, they fan onto the floor.

“You!” I say. “Who are you?” He says nothing. He is looking at the papers in front of me. “Answer me!” I say. My voice has an authority to it, but one that I do not feel.

My mind reels as I try to work out who he could be. Someone from Waring House, perhaps. A patient? Nothing makes any sense. I feel the stirrings of panic as another thought begins to form and then vanishes.

He looks up at me then. “I’m Ben,” he says. He speaks slowly, as if trying to make me understand the obvious. “Ben. Your husband.”

I move back along the floor, away from him, as I fight to remember what I have read, what I know.

“No,” I say, and then again, louder. “No!”

He moves forward. “I am, Christine. You know I am.”

Fear takes me. Terror. It lifts me up, holds me suspended, and then slams me back into its own horror. Claire’s words come back to me. But it’s not Ben. A strange thing happens then. I realize I am not remembering reading about her saying those words, I am remembering the incident itself. I can remember the panic in her voice, the way she said fuck before telling me what she’d realized, and repeated, It’s not Ben.

I am remembering.

“You’re not,” I say. “You’re not Ben. Claire told me! Who are you?”

“Remember the pictures though, Christine? The ones from around the bathroom mirror? Look, I brought them, to show you.”

He takes a step toward me, and then reaches for his bag on the floor beside the bed. He picks out a few curled photographs. “Look!” he says, and when I shake my head, he takes the first one and, glancing at it, holds it up to me.

“This is us,” he says. “Look. Me and you.” The photograph shows us sitting on some sort of boat, on a river, or canal. Behind us there is dark, muddy water, with unfocused reeds beyond that. We both look young, our skin taut where now it sags, our eyes unlined and wide with happiness. “Don’t you see?” he says. “Look! That’s us. Me and you. Years ago. We’ve been together for years, Chris. Years and years.”

I focus on the picture. Images come to me; the two of us, a sunny afternoon. We’d hired a boat somewhere. I don’t know where.

He holds up another picture. We are much older now. It looks recent. We are standing outside a church. The day is overcast, and he is wearing a suit and shaking hands with a man, also in a suit. I am wearing a hat, which I seem to be having difficulty with; I am holding it as if it is in danger of blowing off in the wind. I am not looking at the camera.

“That was just a few weeks ago,” he says. “Some friends of ours invited us to their daughter’s wedding. You remember?”

“No,” I say angrily. “No, I don’t remember!”

“It was a lovely day,” he says, turning the picture back to look at it himself. “Lovely—”

I remember reading what Claire had said when I told her I had found a newspaper clipping about Adam’s death. It can’t have been real.

“Show me one of Adam,” I say. “Go on! Show me just one picture of him.”

“Adam is dead,” he says. “A soldier’s death. Noble. He died a hero—”

I shout, “You should still have a picture of him! Show me!”

He takes out the picture of Adam with Helen. The one I have already seen. Fury rises in me. “Show me just one picture of Adam with you in it. Just one. You must have some, surely? If you’re his father?”

He looks through the photographs in his hand, and I think he will produce a picture of the two of them, but he does not. His arms hang at his side. “I don’t have one with me,” he says. “They must be at the house.”

“You’re not his father, are you?” I say. “What father wouldn’t have pictures of himself with his son?” His eyes narrow, as if in rage, but I cannot stop. “And what kind of father would tell his wife that their son was dead when he isn’t? Admit it! You’re not Adam’s father! Ben is.” Even as I said the name, an image came to me. A man with narrow, dark-rimmed glasses and black hair. Ben. I say his name again, as if to lock the image in my mind. “Ben.”

The name has an effect on the man standing in front of me. He says something, but too quietly for me to hear it, and so I ask him to repeat it. “You don’t need Adam,” he says.

“What?” I say, and he speaks more firmly, looking into my eyes as he does so.

“You don’t need Adam. You have me now. We’re together. You don’t need Adam. You don’t need Ben.”

At his words, I feel all the strength I had within me disappear, and, as it goes, he seems to recover. I sink to the floor. He smiles.

“Don’t be upset,” he says brightly. “What does it matter? I love you. That’s all that’s important. Surely? I love you, and you love me.”

He crouches down, holding out his hands toward me. He is smiling, as if I am an animal that he is trying to coax out of the hole in which it has hidden.

“Come,” he says. “Come to me.”

I shift farther backward, sliding on my haunches. I hit something solid and feel the warm, sticky radiator behind me. I realize I am under the window at the far end of the room. He advances slowly.

“Who are you?” I say again, trying to keep my voice even, calm. “What do you want?”

He stops moving. He is crouched in front of me. If he were to reach out, he could touch my foot, my knee. If he were to move closer, I may be able to kick him, should I need to, though I am not sure I could reach and, in any case, am barefoot.

“What do I want?” he says. “I don’t want anything. I just want us to be happy, Chris. Like we used to be. Do you remember?”

That word again. Remember. For a moment, I think perhaps he is being sarcastic.

“I don’t know who you are,” I say, near hysterical. “How can I remember? I’ve never met you before!”

His smile vanishes then. I see his face collapse in on itself with pain. There is a moment of limbo, as if the balance of power is shifting from him to me and, for a fraction of a second, it is equal between us.

He becomes animated again. “But you love me,” he says. “I read it, in your journal. You said you love me. I know you want us to be together. Why can’t you remember that?”

“My journal!” I say. I know he must have known about it—how else did he remove those vital pages?—but I realize he must have been reading it for a while, at least since I first told him about it a week ago. “How long have you been reading my journal?”

He doesn’t seem to have heard me. He raises his voice, as if in triumph. “Tell me you don’t love me,” he says. I say nothing. “See? You can’t, can you? You can’t say it. Because you do. You always have done, Chris. Always.”

He rocks back, and the two of us sit on the floor, opposite each other. “I remember when we met,” he says. I think of what he’s told me—spilled coffee in the university library—and wonder what is coming now.

“You were working on something. You used to go to the same café every day. You always used to sit in the window, in the same seat. Sometimes you would have a child with you, but usually not. You would sit with a notebook open in front of you, either writing or sometimes just looking out of the window. I thought you looked so beautiful. I used to walk past you, every day, on my way to catch the bus, and I started to look forward to my walk home so that I could catch a glimpse of you. I used to try and guess what you might be wearing, or whether you’d have your hair pulled back or loose, or whether you’d have a snack, a cake, or a sandwich. Sometimes you’d have a whole brownie in front of you, sometimes just a plate of crumbs, or even nothing at all, just the tea.”

He laughs, shaking his head sadly, and I remember Claire telling me about the café and know that he is speaking the truth. “I would pass by at exactly the same time every day,” he says, “and no matter how hard I tried I just couldn’t work out how you decided when to eat your snack. At first I thought maybe it depended on the day of the week, but it didn’t seem to follow any pattern there, so then I thought perhaps it was related to the date. But that didn’t seem to work, either. I started to wonder what time you actually ordered your snack. I thought maybe that was related to the time that you got to the café, so I started to leave work earlier and run so that I could maybe see you arriving. And then, one day, you weren’t there. I waited until I saw you coming down the street. You were pushing a stroller, and when you got to the café door, you seemed to have trouble getting it in. You looked so helpless and stuck, and, without thinking, I walked over the road and held the door for you. And you smiled at me, and said, ‘Thank you so much.’ You looked so beautiful, Christine. I wanted to kiss you, there and then, but I couldn’t, and because I didn’t want you to think that I’d run across the road just to help you, I went into the café, too, and stood behind you in the line. You spoke to me as we waited. ‘Busy today, isn’t it?’ you said, and I said, ‘Yes,’ even though it wasn’t particularly busy for that time of day. I just wanted to carry on making conversation. I ordered tea, and I had the same cake as you, too, and I wondered if I should ask you whether it would be okay for me to sit with you, but by the time I’d got my tea, you were chatting to someone, one of the people who ran the café, I think, and so I sat on my own in the corner.

“After that, I used to go to the café almost every day. It’s always easier to do something when you’ve done it once. Sometimes I’d wait for you to arrive, or make sure you were there before I went in, but sometimes I’d just go in anyway. And you noticed me. I know you did. You began to say hello to me, or you’d comment on the weather. And then one time I was held up, and when I arrived, you actually said, ‘You’re late today!’ as I walked past, holding my tea and my muffin, and when you saw that there were no free tables, you said, ‘Why don’t you sit here?’ and you pointed to the chair at your table, opposite you. The baby wasn’t there that day, so I said, ‘Are you sure you don’t mind? I won’t disturb you?’ and then I felt bad for saying that, and I dreaded you saying that yes, actually, on second thought, it would disturb you. But you didn’t, you said, ‘No! Not at all! To be honest it’s not going too well anyway. I’d be glad of a distraction!’ and that was how I knew that you wanted me to speak to you rather than just have my tea and eat my cake in silence. Do you remember?”

I shake my head. I have decided to let him speak. I want to find out everything he has to say.

“So I sat, and we chatted. You told me you were a writer. You said you’d had a book published, but you were struggling with your second one. I asked what it was about, but you wouldn’t tell me. ‘It’s fiction,’ you said, and then you said, ‘supposedly,’ and you suddenly looked very sad, so I offered to buy you another cup of coffee. You said that would be nice, but that you didn’t have any money with you to buy me one. ‘I don’t bring my purse when I come here,’ you said. ‘I just bring enough money to buy one drink and one snack. That way I’m not tempted to pig out!’ I thought it was an odd thing to say. You didn’t look as though you needed to worry about how much you ate at all. You were always so slim. But anyway, I was glad, as it meant you must be enjoying speaking to me, and you would owe me a drink, so we’d have to see each other again. I said that it didn’t matter about the money, or buying me one back, and I got us some more tea and coffee. After that, we started to meet quite regularly.”