I’m not sure telling me I’m his fondest ever friendzoning is the winning suit he thinks it is.
After an hour of knocking back black coffee like it’s hard liquor, I force myself to message Ed back.
I’ve been going back and forth, over and over, what I say or do next, and I still don’t know.
My only firm conclusion is: if I hadn’t wanted this conversation with Ed, I shouldn’t have sounded off at Susie’s wake. (Her wake? Wakes are for the dead.)
And there’s a glaring problem with holding Ed to account for this – Becky’s letter showed Susie knew how I felt. If Susie knew, then she and Ed must’ve discussed it. The fact neither of them told me proves something was said. How far do I pursue the humiliation of getting Ed to spell it out? We agreed that as you’re patently a lovesick wreck …
Yet their knowledge is central to my betrayal, can’t raise one without the other. I don’t know how to navigate that.
I concede out of sheer practicality. I have to see him, though. It’s Justin’s birthday soon.
OK, you can come round to mine tonight at eight. I’m checking in on Susie’s dad straight after work.
The day passes in a listless stress haze of wondering what Ed will say tonight.
There should be a German word for both dying to know something and, at the same time, being sick with terror at the prospect of hearing anything about it whatsoever.
Dying to know. Susie is dead. I rehearse that fact for the hundredth time. It rears up and punches me again.
‘Why are you wearing those docker’s boots with a nice frock?’ Phil says, as I get up to leave at half five. ‘What do you look like?’ He pauses and I gather this isn’t rhetorical. ‘You’re reminding me of something. I know! One of those Art Deco lamps. My mum’s got a repro. A graceful dancing lady with a long swirly dress, stood on a big heavy base.’
Despite myself, I laugh.
As I queue for my bus home, my phone pings. Finlay Hart. A name to spark loathing and dread. As it once did for his late sister, I guess.
Hi Eve, I’m in the UK again next week to sort the sale of Susie’s house and I’ve still not had the diaries and letters returned. Can we make an arrangement to meet, for you to hand them over? Thanks. Finlay
I thought that was going to involve lawyers?
This is a last chance to avoid that. Up to you.
Hmmm, I smell bluff. Surely if he was going to do that, he’d have done it by now?
My intransigence with Fin could look like hardball but, in truth, my silence comes from the fact that I don’t know what to do. I’m scared of myself around that box. What if I’m compelled to pry, and discover yet more?
Susie wouldn’t want Finlay to have them, that’s my only certainty. But am I creating a real-world problem for the sake of some abstract notion of her honour? You can’t embarrass the dead. The living have to pay solicitors, and I’m perpetually skint.
I try to hear Susie’s voice, but on this matter, she’s silent.
22
I’m not fully sure if Iain Hart wants or needs my calling round, but I absolutely can’t not do it, so I’m glad he seems to receive my visits with pleasure, albeit with a slight air of courteous bafflement. I make a peculiar busybody, but so far he’s not busy enough himself to mind.
Once a week I turn up on his doorstep, usually with biscuits – having usefully discovered Mr Hart is a biscuit fiend – announce I was ‘in the area’ and ask if he ‘needs anything’. We have a cup of tea, a chat about this and that, and I reassure myself he seems safe and well enough to keep buggering on.
Today he seems edgier than usual, forgetting to eat his plain chocolate Digestives, wanting to tell me about the professional hierarchies at his long-since-sold company. I get the feeling he has a nagging sense of leaving things unattended, but isn’t able to articulate what or how. Up until now, his dementia has seemed quite benign, if sad. Because he’s outwardly so cheerful and functioning, it wasn’t too startling. Now I see more clearly that it’s a living prison.
‘Anyway, I mustn’t run on and bore you,’ he says. ‘You young people have got more exciting things to be doing. I was young once too, haha! Look, here …’
He picks up a picture on the mantelpiece, a 1980s wedding, full of leg-of-mutton sleeves, artificial flower crowns and estate agent suits, and points to himself, more luxuriant in moustache. He has his hand on the head of a small, sombre-faced dark-haired boy, who must be Finlay.
‘That’s my brother Don’s wedding. He lives in Edinburgh. A beautiful city, it’s where I grew up. Have you been?’
‘Once as a kid, but not for ages,’ I say.
‘Oh you should, you should! I should visit Don actually, it’s been too long.’
‘I’m sure he’d like to see you,’ I say, wondering if Don was at the funeral. My only point of introduction would be Finlay, and he was hardly likely to bother. Had Susie told her uncle of her dad’s infirmity? She never spoke about her wider family, even when we were kids, really. If only we’d known we’d need handover notes. If only we’d known lots of things.
I get home with only half an hour to spare before Ed arrives, and find that I can’t eat for nerves. Wine for dinner it is then.
He arrives right on eight, and Roger’s at the door wailing his excitement as Ed steps into the room, the stripy traitor.
I hate that even now, at the sight of him in his cagoule and rain-damp hair, I want him to hug me. You cannot reason with what your senses crave, it seems. Everyone’s a fool for somebody, as my mum says.
‘Alright, Rog, she not been feeding you again? Guess what Uncle Edward brought you!’
He produces Roger’s favourite beef-flavour chew sticks in front of him, and flaps the packet, at which point Roger’s vocal pitch moves from ‘girl at a Bay City Rollers concert’ to ‘actual seizure’.
While he’s gnawing on Ed’s insufficient peace offering, our eyes meet fully. Ed is glowing with exercise.
‘Drink?’ I say, brusquely.
‘One. I’m on my bike, don’t want to fall off.’
‘Take a seat. Beer?’
‘Yes, cheers.’
I go to the fridge, pour myself a large Sauvignon, then crack the ring pull on a can of Staropramen and hand it to him.
There’s no appetite for small talk and Ed, always one to read a room, says, business-like: ‘Firstly, I’ve been wanting to say for ages, sorry for Hester being a dickhead at the wake. She’s pretty mortified at what was said. There’s no hard feelings. Or, not from her end.’
‘I can’t believe she admitted she was out of order.’
I’m not going to be overtly rude about Hester to her fiancé, but equally, I’m not going to be so scrupulous about hiding my opinion of her behaviour, from now on. Some truth has broken through. It can be the new normal.
‘Yes, she has,’ Ed says, with a forehead-creasing, hard frown that makes me think he came out of his corner fighting, once they were home.
‘She was bladdered’ (she wasn’t, I think, but whatever works) ‘… and she’s got so consumed with the wedding. When I pointed she was blithely talking about Susie being replaced, to her best friend, she got it.’