Told in Silence

‘It was an accident,’ I said, and in the same instant heard the bell go. A group of young girls poured into the shop, chatting and screaming with laughter. Catherine looked swiftly across at them, then back at me, frozen into silence. Excuse me, excuse me, one of the girls was bleating, holding up a skirt, do you have this in a size ten? She means a twelve, another cut in. Whoops of laughter. You cheeky cow. Oh, come on – you’re never a ten. Their words rolled around the walls like marbles. I watched Catherine rise reluctantly from her seat and move towards them. I could still feel my pulse beating hard and fast, thumping in my eardrums. I slipped the chain back inside my shirt. For the rest of the shift, I could feel the cool, perfect circle of the ring against my skin, always there, reminding me, branding me.

We stay away from the office for the next two days, holed up together in Jonathan’s penthouse flat, leaving only to buy food, which we eat mostly in bed. On Friday morning he sleeps in until twelve, and I spend over an hour just lying there looking at him. His lips are slightly parted, showing a flash of white pointed teeth that gives me a sick, shifting pang of lust deep inside my stomach. His eyes move mysteriously under closed lids, rolling and flickering. I want to peel them back and step into his dreams.

When he wakes he reaches for me reflexively. ‘Good morning,’ he murmurs.

‘Good morning,’ I repeat. He must catch something different in my voice, because he sits up sharply.

‘What’s up?’ he says. ‘Are you hungry? Do you want me to get you something to eat?’

‘No,’ I say. ‘It’s just…I’ll have to go soon.’

Jonathan shakes his head, more in confusion than disagreement, as if he simply cannot believe what he is hearing. ‘Go where?’ he asks. ‘What for?’

I spread my hands helplessly. ‘I’m going to Manchester tomorrow,’ I say. ‘To start university. You know that.’

He frowns a little, lines creasing the smooth beauty of his forehead. ‘You can’t do that,’ he says. When I don’t reply, he repeats it, louder this time. ‘You can’t do that. You’ll have to cancel.’

Even though I can hardly bear the thought of leaving him, a laugh rises unwillingly in my throat. ‘You can’t just cancel university. I have to go.’

‘No,’ he says, grabbing my hand, pulling me against him. We are so close that I can’t even focus on him any more, but I can still feel his eyes boring through me. ‘You have to stay. Here with me. If you go to Manchester, it’s over.’

His words land like a punch and I gasp. This conversation is moving too fast, making me dizzy. If I’ve thought about it at all in the haze of the past two days, I have vaguely assumed that we will manage, no matter how far apart we are; visits at weekends, long stretches of time together in the holidays. I love him, and although he hasn’t yet said so, I know he loves me too. This is what love is about: enduring separation, believing that we can surmount all obstacles. I tell him as much, but he thumps his hand impatiently down on the bed, making me flinch.

‘No, Violet,’ he barks. His face is aflame with anger and outrage. ‘Love is about being together. I want you, and it’s now or it’s not at all – I won’t wait for you.’ It should sound hard and unfeeling, but somehow it doesn’t. It sounds like exactly what I’ve dreamt of hearing all my life. Someone who needs me, who’s desperate for me, so desperate that he can’t even bear me to be out of his sight.

‘I can’t,’ I say again, but the conviction has gone from my voice.

He leaps up and pulls on a robe; grabbing the phone from the bedside table, he strides back and brandishes it in front of me. ‘Of course you can,’ he says. ‘You can call them right now and tell them you’re not coming.’ Suddenly, he smiles wickedly, and the warmth of it soaks right through my skin to my bones. As I take the phone I’m laughing and shaking my head, because it’s all so ridiculous, because the truth of it is that I barely know him, because it would be crazy to throw the future I’ve planned for months away with one phone call, and because I know that this is it, suddenly there’s no other option – he’s the one and I’m going to do it.

The woman at the admissions office on the other end of the line is silent for a long while, and then asks to speak to my parents. My mouth opens and words fall out: I tell her she can’t, because they are both dead. I have not crafted my thoughts or moulded them into speech – they have just happened to me, used me as a vessel. As the woman flounders and gropes for a response, I press the button and cut her off. I’m laughing like a madwoman as I jump into Jonathan’s arms. He hugs me back, but I can feel the tension in his shoulders. Sure enough, after a few seconds he grips me by my arms and pushes me back slightly, frowning at me.

‘Was that true?’ he asks.

‘No,’ I say, even though an inner voice is telling me to stick to my story. To do otherwise looks crazy, unreliable, but I can’t help myself. Anyone else I can lie to, I think, but not you, not you.

He tips his head back sharply for an instant, as if to throw his thoughts together into a heap. ‘Why did you say it, then?’ he asks. I can’t know, at this point, that denying his parents’ existence would seem to him the worst kind of sacrilege.

I shrug, looking at him steadily, straight on. This is who I am, and if he can’t accept it then he is not who I think he is. ‘I had to say something,’ I say. ‘I’m doing this for you.’

For a split second, uncertainty pulses across his face and I feel something curl coldly between us; a sudden distance, a moment of clarity. We’re facing each other, both our bodies tensed. His face spells out his thoughts as plainly as if he has shouted them into the silent room. He’s wondering what the hell he is doing, if he is right to have pushed me to make that call, if it’s too late to backtrack. He’s wondering whether I am worth his time. Just as he begins to speak, his mobile rings, shrilling and flashing insistently from the bedroom cabinet. His head snaps instantly towards it, and he strides across the room to pick it up. Facing away from me, he murmurs a hello. I watch his back straighten; he moves towards the balcony, pushing the glass doors open and pulling them to again behind him. I’m left alone in the bedroom. I stare down at my hands; they are clenched and shaking, blurring in front of me. I feel as if I have narrowly avoided a disaster. In the past two days I have discovered something so strong and so powerful that it comes as a shock to find that it could also be so fragile. I can’t let him take this away from me, from us. I will have to fight for him.

Dimly, I become aware of his voice outside on the balcony, seeping in through the tiny gap where the door has not quite closed. He’s saying that there is nothing to worry about, that he has everything under control and that he will be back in the office on Monday. He sounds deferential, stumbling over his words in a way I have never heard before. After a minute’s taut silence, he says, ‘Yes – yes, she is.’ Another silence, and then a short, relieved laugh.

‘OK,’ he says, and as he does so he pushes the door open again and steps back inside the room. ‘I will. Lunchtime tomorrow at the club? Got it. I’ll see you then.’ He disconnects the call and tosses the phone on to the bed, breathing deeply. He glances at me and I am surprised and relieved to see a flirtatious spark in his eyes. ‘That was my father,’ he says. ‘Wondering why I’ve been playing hooky from the office. He’s a clever old devil, I’ll give him that – he worked out that you must be with me, and he’s intrigued. He wants to meet you—us—for lunch tomorrow with him and my mother. Fancy it?’

I blink, unsure of what has just happened. The thought of lunch with Jonathan’s parents both exhilarates and terrifies me. I stare at him, running the tip of my tongue nervously along my bottom lip. ‘Yes,’ I say, because there seems to be nothing else to say, nothing else that will keep us on this course.

He comes to sit beside me on the bed and puts his arm around me, and with that one gesture my doubts dissolve and I want to weep with relief. ‘I’m sorry this is all so fast,’ he whispers into my neck. ‘But I don’t want to lose you. I know that already.’ He kisses my collarbone, a soft, long kiss that makes me close my eyes. ‘You’d better go home later,’ he says. ‘Explain things to those parents of yours. Maybe leave out the part about them being dead.’ A low snort of amusement against my neck lets me know that he’s teasing me, repainting what initially seemed bizarre and disturbing in a kinder, more indulgent light.

‘We’re not close,’ I say. I’m trying to justify myself to him, but he doesn’t seem interested in hearing me. He’s running his hands slowly over me from top to toe, as if he has just noticed that I am naked. He mutters something that I can’t catch, and soon enough I don’t want to talk any more. He attacks my body with a passion that half frightens me, so roughly at times that I can feel the pain stabbing at me through the haze of pleasure, and more than once I almost scream at him to stop, but he seems to read my thoughts and softens his touch at the crucial moment every time. Soon enough I will reflect that things are much the same out of bed as they are in it. Some people have a knack for bringing you to the brink again and again, pushing you right to the limit of your endurance until you think you cannot take any more, but never quite tipping you over the edge and out of love.

Laura was in the garden when I returned from the shop, tying lengths of pale green and lilac crêpe paper in bows around the back of each chair in turn. I stood and watched her from the kitchen window. When she had tied each bow, she stepped back, shaded her eyes against the sun and tipped her head a little to one side, as if expecting the chair to speak to her. Several times she came forward again and readjusted the crêpe paper, fluffing it primly and precisely into place until she was satisfied. There must have been fifty or sixty chairs in total, huddled in groups around spindly metal tables dotted across the sweep of lawn. A pile of bunting was stacked up by one of the tables – multicoloured flags strung together on a pale yellow cord, stirring slightly with the summer wind. As I leaned out of the window, peering closer, I could see tiny sparkling dots nestling in the grass, winking and glimmering like jewels. Rose petals perhaps, or some kind of confetti. As I stared at them, Laura looked up and saw me, gave me a little wave. I came out into the garden to join her.

‘How was the shop?’ she asked when I was close enough to pick up the soft, low register of her voice.

Briefly, I considered telling her the truth. I told Catherine about Jonathan today. She treated me differently all afternoon, and before I left she asked me whether I wanted to talk any more about it. I said no, but now I’m not so sure. I think I might, and soon. ‘This all looks great,’ I said instead, gesticulating to take in the whole lawn. ‘Better hope it doesn’t rain overnight.’

‘Oh, it won’t rain.’ A hint of Laura’s old imperiousness surfaced. ‘I wanted to get everything ready today, so that I could concentrate on the food tomorrow. We’ve got almost sixty coming, you know.’

There was pride in her words. I stared out across the lawn, shading my eyes against the evening sun, trying to imagine it filled with people intent on celebrating Harvey’s sixty-fourth birthday. It was an arbitrary number to be making such a fuss over, but I suspected that the birthday itself was little but a device to kick-start Harvey’s return to society. Last year, visitors had come and gone with a monotonous regularity that had rapidly thinned into nothingness when it became clear that none of us was inclined to put on a brave face and entertain company. I could tell that through his grief Harvey was still capable of being disappointed by the shoddy pretence of respect with which his erstwhile friends and colleagues had retreated – and contemptuous of it, too. All the same, the garden party had been his idea, perhaps to test the permanence of the situation. As the RSVPs had trickled back I had sensed a kind of cold satisfaction emanating from him, a growing confirmation that he had not been erased as swiftly as it had appeared. He had always known, as well as they did, that he was not the sort of person who was easily forgotten.

‘It’ll be strange,’ I heard Laura say, as if half to herself. ‘Seeing everyone again. It feels like such a long time since we’ve had this sort of gathering.’ Her fingers plucked disconsolately at a thread of lilac crêpe, teasing it apart into long filmy strands. ‘I hope Dad enjoys it.’

‘I hope we all do,’ I said, ‘but there’s no reason why we wouldn’t.’ Empty though the words were, they seemed to reassure her, and she nodded. I hesitated, and then put my hand over hers. Despite the heat of the day, her skin felt cold and faintly damp, as if she had just come in out of the rain.

‘I think this will be good for you, Violet,’ she said unexpectedly. ‘You’re too young to…’ She trailed off and, not wanting her to go on, I gripped her hand more tightly. The sudden smart of tears behind my eyes surprised me. Affection, even love, for Laura tended to strike me like that; randomly, as if unthought of ever before.

‘I’m looking forward to it,’ I said, as brightly as I could muster, and as I smiled at her I felt my spirits lift with the knowledge that I wasn’t lying. The closest I had got to a party in the past nine months was a strained, abortive gathering with a few of Jonathan’s old university friends – women ten years older than myself who wanted to drink cocktails, talk loudly about their own lives and subtly compete to give the impression that they themselves had been far more deeply touched and bruised by my husband’s death than I could ever imagine. It was a mistake that I had never made again. There was something unsettling about the distance I felt from them, a sharp contrast to the easy friendliness with which they had seemed to welcome me when Jonathan and I were first married. Perhaps they had seen me as temporary. Now, in their eyes and mine, he would always belong to me, and they had not liked it.

‘Really, I’m looking forward to it,’ I said again, almost defiantly. Still smiling, I swung round to look back at the house, and saw Harvey there. He was standing motionless at the kitchen window. I raised my hand, but he gave no sign of having noticed me. He was staring out through the glass across the lawn, his face blank and remote, as if he were watching Rome burn.

I began to walk back towards the house. I didn’t want to see the garden through his eyes, as I knew I would if I turned around again: the pointless little bunched-together groups of tables, the coloured bows fluttering emptily in the breeze. Harvey had a way of stripping back pretence, albeit without intent or volition. He simply saw the futility of things, and it bled out of him, tainting everything that it touched.

I heard them before I saw them: a rising and falling hubbub of voices outside the kitchen door, their words blurring into each other so that I could barely make sense of them. I kept my head down, piping cream into meringues in perfect circles, feeling heat spilling over me. Now that the guests were arriving I wanted them gone again. A painful shyness was spreading in my chest, making me gasp for breath. My fingers shook as I placed the strawberries one by one on top of each meringue, taking far longer than I needed, spinning out the task. Above the general hum I heard Harvey’s coolly authoritative tones, inviting the guests to go out into the garden and exchanging niceties. Now and again, I thought I could hear Laura chiming in, palely echoing his words. Shadows moved across the work-surface as people passed outside, but I kept my back to the window. I collected the meringues on to their silver platter, then went to wash my hands. In my agitation I turned the tap on too hard and water sprayed out on to my dress, staining darkly against the red linen. I dabbed it ineffectually with a tea towel, feeling my heart beat faster, hearing the voices grow louder outside.

‘And where is Violet?’ I heard someone say, my name cutting through the babble of words. ‘How is she?’ I didn’t recognise the woman’s voice, but her tone was deferential, sympathetic, as if she were referring to an invalid. I couldn’t catch Laura’s reply, but the woman made a noise of ostentatious understanding in response. ‘Of course, it’s very hard on her,’ I heard her say. ‘On all of you.’

I snatched up a tray of quiches at random and made for the back door, gripping the tray tightly to cancel out my shaking. When I saw the lawn I stopped in my tracks and blinked, half dazzled; dozens of people, many of them women with bright, jewel-coloured hats and shoes that danced and sparkled jauntily in the sun. I had not meant to make an entrance, but as I appeared, conversations seemed to fade, heads turn sharply my way for an instant before whipping back into place. I came forward across the lawn, placed the tray carefully down on to the nearest table, then straightened up, searching for a face I recognised. Many of them stirred up vague memories: ex-colleagues from Harvey’s law firm, their eyes alert and watchful. I couldn’t remember a single one of their names.

I saw Laura and made my way towards her, forcing my lips into a smile. Next to her, a large matronly woman loomed, her hair teased up into tight little brown curls that clustered around her bovine face. I knew instinctively that it was her voice I had heard in the kitchen, but I had no idea who she was.

‘Violet, I was just going to bring out some more of the food – but you remember Miranda,’ Laura said, almost beseechingly, as if willing me to say yes. I looked closer, and with a shock I connected the name and the face: Miranda Foster, Jonathan’s godmother and an old family friend. All at once I could see her on our wedding day, bearing down on me and telling me how lucky I was and how Jonathan was like a son to her, before enfolding him lasciviously in a hug like no mother I had ever seen. The past eighteen months had not been kind to her; her face looked strained and stiff, as if it had been dipped in wax.

‘Of course,’ I said, holding out my hand, but Miranda made an impatient gesture and cast aside the sandwich she had been holding, pulling me against her voluptuous bosom into a forced embrace. I froze in shock, the sticky, cloying scent of her perfume flooding my nostrils.

‘My poor child,’ she whispered into my ear. ‘What you must have been through!’ As swiftly as she had drawn me towards her, she pushed me back, holding me by the shoulders to examine me. ‘You look older,’ she said, a little critically. ‘I suppose it’s to be expected.’

Yes, I almost said, the passage of time tends to have that effect – but I knew that was not what she meant. What she was trying to imply, not very subtly, was that grief had ravaged me, stolen the youthful bloom that she might once have envied and rendered me wholly unremarkable. She may well have been right, but I fiercely resented her assumption that she was entitled to say it. She was no one to me; had meant less than nothing to Jonathan, who had once told me that he wished the old harridan would stop undressing him with her eyes every time they met. For an instant I felt my colour rise and the words threatened to burst out of me.

‘I suppose it is, yes – for all of us,’ I contented myself with. ‘I would hardly have recognised you.’

Miranda’s brow wrinkled in suspicion and dismay, but before she could speak Harvey materialised at my side. He was wearing a crisp linen suit in pale grey, his silver hair drawn back from his forehead, and a necktie I had not seen before: an unusually flamboyant affair, apple-green silk shot through with metallic thread. When she saw him, Miranda’s face softened into what I suspected she thought was coquettishness, and which indeed might have been in a woman half her age.

‘Lovely to see you, so glad you could make it,’ Harvey said smoothly. ‘Violet, why don’t you go and see if anyone would like a top-up? There’s more champagne inside.’

Gratefully, I broke away. Harvey had an instinct for seeing when people needed to be rescued and an admirably selfsacrificing nature when it came to substituting himself into the firing line; it was something I had forgotten about him in these months of near-isolation. As I retreated, I stole a look back at him. He appeared relaxed, urbane and smiling. It was impossible to tell whether it was just an act.

I spent the next hour passing through the crowd, offering drinks and canapés, stopping here and there for a brief five minutes of small talk. Most of the guests had eyes that flooded with a mixture of pity and curiosity as they spoke to me, but at least, unlike Miranda, they had the good sense to keep their tongues in check and stuck to chatting about the weather. As time passed I felt myself begin to unwind, the tension relaxing from my muscles. A couple of Harvey’s colleagues flirted gallantly and unthreateningly with me, making me roll my eyes and blush. I wondered whether I might be having fun. Standing there on the lawn in my red dress, tossing my hair over my shoulders and laughing, I caught a glimpse of the future opening up. It was not the future I had planned and not the kind of fun I had been accustomed to, but there was little prospect of that any more. Glancing into the crowd of guests, I tried to imagine Jonathan among them, moving with his old confident ease from group to group, and found that I could not. For so long I had carried him around with me like a dead weight, projecting him so vividly into every situation I found myself in that it sometimes seemed I had summoned his ghost. The thought felt disloyal, but if I had lost the knack, I was not sure that I wanted it back. I was tired of missing him, tired of living my life around someone who no longer existed. Any respite from it, no matter how temporary, made me giddily thankful.