I strain to remember any time when I’d come back from seeing Mark, when Susie had been different. I can’t. I remember larking around in that flat, Susie smoking with her arm held out of the sash window. She was seeing people, on and off, but never anyone significant.
With some effort, I remember her once saying to me, uncharacteristically pensive: ‘The thing about you and men, Eve, is you fall very rarely and very hard. I fall often, but I’m over it in a week.’
She must’ve meant Ed – so she fell for him too? Why did she never confess? Did she think I’d explode into a shower of dry leaves? I pick up my glass.
‘You let Hester carry on being friends with Susie, with no idea?’
‘That was utterly shit of me, yes. But I only had shit choices. If I confessed and our relationship survived it, I wouldn’t have been allowed to still be mates with Suze, so RIP our gang. She’s always been messed-up about how close we all are, as you may have noticed. The cost–benefit didn’t seem worth it, and it still doesn’t.’
‘The cost–benefit,’ I say, witheringly. ‘It wasn’t about balancing books. It wasn’t going to benefit you.’
‘No, exactly, who would it benefit? Hester deserves to know the truth, in principle, but it wouldn’t benefit her, quite the opposite. There’s no way of discussing this without sounding terrible, because it was. It was a really gross thing to do and I’m ashamed of it to this day. You want the ugly truth? Well, it’s ugly.’
I’m randomly reminded of my mum and dad arguing over Bill Clinton’s impeachment. My dad saying: ‘You ask a man if he fooled around with someone who wasn’t his wife, he’s going to say no, isn’t he? What man in the world when put on the spot would say: “Ya got me”? I don’t see why him lying was a big deal when anyone in his shoes would.’ My mum replying: ‘He shouldn’t have fooled around!’ My dad: ‘Yes but that’s a “I wouldn’t start from here” when someone’s asking for directions, Connie, isn’t it.’
Am I unreasonable, asking Ed to be better than a president? Ed’s lies have only been omission.
Roger, offstage, slaps at the door on his cat litter box.
‘… I’ve asked myself, apart from alcohol, why I did it,’ Ed says. ‘I’ve never come up with a better answer than “Because I could.” You can’t disown your own character under the influence. Suze used to taunt me for being staid, a lot. I think showing off might’ve been involved. When I realised what she was intending, me feeling I had to meet the challenge and show I could be wild, too. Ironic, given there was nothing to be proud about in what happened, the opposite. I couldn’t have made myself look or feel more ridiculous.’
‘Oh, it was her pushing for it, was it?’ I say, rolling my eyes.
‘As I recall, yes,’ Ed says, looking dog-tired all of a sudden. ‘I can’t be sure, given how drunk we were. But I wouldn’t have dared drag her to the women’s bogs.’
There is, at the heart of this explanation and apology – if that’s what it is – a problem. All this might be true, but the connection I thought Ed and I had – it can’t exist. Or not in the way I thought it did, if he could do this. Anyone but her, the closest human being to me. I weathered the treachery of Hester, as I could follow how it happened. Not this.
‘This isn’t the person I thought you were,’ I say, bleakly. And although, in my head, this wasn’t a killer line, only a spasm of pain that I couldn’t help exiting my mouth, Ed visibly crumples at it.
‘Yes, I know,’ he says. He takes a deep breath: ‘It’s not who I thought I was. Your opinion is everything to me.’
The most difficult part of this for me is upon us, and I have to tackle it, even though it makes me feel like I’m sitting here naked.
‘Susie said in her letter she didn’t want me to know, in particular?’ I hold my breath.
Ed breaks eye contact for a moment and says: ‘She was aware there was … something between us. She felt she’d let you down, because of that.’
I writhe, and maintain a false composure: ‘Did you tell Susie about the letter you sent me? At university?’
‘No! Why would I do that?’ Ed, wide-eyed, thinks he’s scored a point here, kept my confidence. But I know what it means – he let it all rest on me.
‘Then why would she think there was something between us?’
This is a question I would only dare ask under extreme duress, and to someone with Ed’s size of motive to be tactful right now. Did I really make it obvious? is one of the world’s most agonising inquiries.
Ed lifts his hands from his knees in an I don’t know gesture. ‘I’m not sure.’
‘What did she say?’ I ask.
‘Do you really want me to go into this?’ he says.
‘No, Ed, I don’t!’ I say, temper breaking, in my fierce blushing. It’s a funny combination. ‘I don’t want to hear a word of it, but thanks to you, it happened, I found out, and Susie’s dead. I’m going to have to spend the rest of my life wondering why she kept this from me, otherwise. It’s “need”, not “want”. I’d have thought that was pretty obvious.’
‘She said she thought you were in love with me and it would destroy you,’ Ed says, in a rush, and looks at his knees.
I’m damp with sweat. I don’t change expression.
‘Erm, OK. Wow.’ This is good and ambiguous, I think. It could mean wow she knew, or wow she thought that? ‘Then you said …?’
‘I agreed it wasn’t a good idea to tell you.’
‘But you didn’t say oh hey, I told Eve I was madly in love with her, a few years back?’
‘No,’ Ed says, frowning. ‘It wasn’t the moment and I kind of assumed you’d have told Susie about that at the time, anyway?’
It hadn’t occurred to me he’d think this. I suppose he would’ve thought that, what with girl talk and gossip. The truth is, it was first too precious, and then too painful, to let any sunlight in on it. And as usual, the group was to be protected at all costs.
I only say: ‘Nope.’
I wonder why he thinks I didn’t tell Susie.
‘Eve,’ Ed says. ‘I know “speaking for Susie” keeps tripping us up, but she’d be crushed to think she’d hurt you by keeping this from you. Nothing mattered to her the way you did. Nothing.’
This rings hollow, after talking about a night when my feelings definitely didn’t matter to her. She knew I was in love, and it would destroy me, and she still did it. ‘Destroy’ – her word, not mine.
For nothing more than an ungainly, sloppy one-night stand. She was Susie Hart, she could’ve gone home with any man in that club if she’d wanted to.
What would she say if she was here? I can only imagine some version of Ed’s: we were drunk, we were idiots. Much stupid, so regret. What other excuse is there? She wasn’t the person I thought she was.
‘Would Hester still marry you if she knew?’ I say, making it clear there’s no point to any more mollifying speechifying from Ed.
‘I don’t know. It would be an apocalyptic fight. It being Susie would make it a thousand times worse, of course, compared to some anonymous woman. I don’t want her to think the less of Susie.’ Ed holds up a palm as he sees my jaw drop. ‘Yeah, you can call that a really slimy thing to say, it is, but it’s true. You think Susie would want that, in her memory? Us splitting up over some decade-old embarrassing transgression? Or Hester being tormented by the thought of it? You’ve found it gruesome enough.’