ALI
26 April 2017
Twenty-one
Ali slumps at the kitchen table and wriggles her toes in her black opaque tights, pushing her heels down firmly. The house is quiet for once. Ten p.m.: the packed lunches made and kitchen tidied – or as tidy as it will ever be. The children are asleep, Ed is away and although she knows she should try to catch up on some sleep, she needs to summon up the energy to go through the palaver of getting ready for bed. Besides, it is so rare to have a moment just to stop. To have the time to think.
She takes a sip of her tea: decaffeinated Earl Grey, milky and comforting, the adult equivalent of the warm milk that Joel still clamours for at bedtime and which she makes if she is in a good mood. Not something that happens much, these days. She reaches for yesterday’s Guardian. She rarely gets the papers in the week but this was a freebie picked up on an emergency supermarket run: perhaps, for once, she can catch up on world events.
She skims the front page and turns to page three – home to the more salacious stories, even on a broadsheet. It’s a report on the opening day of the James Whitehouse trial. That’s the case that Kate mentioned the last time she was here, in this kitchen: the massive, high-profile case that was supposed to crank her career up a gear. The thought winds her. She hasn’t seen her in over a month – no, nearer six weeks. This must be why. A twinge of guilt: she should have texted good luck. She glances at the clock; as ever, the friend who feels she has the less important job; who is wary of disturbing. No. If she’s working, it’ll only distract her; and, anyway, it’s probably too late.
She scans the first three paragraphs, drinks the story up greedily, absorbing the allegation in seconds: ‘lover’, ‘lift’, ‘House of Commons’ and that sinister detail that stops it being just a juicy bit of gossip: ‘rape’. Clever Kate, to be given such an important case – though she still finds it hard to believe he is guilty. There he is, in a four-column-wide photo: his expression, a compelling mix of seriousness and clear-sighted confidence. No smile; no hint of smugness; just that sense of intrinsic self-belief. He knows he is innocent, his expression suggests, and so the jury cannot help but be convinced.
Her scalp prickles with unease. If he is innocent, then Kate is prosecuting a blameless man. How can she do that? It’s something she has never understood about barristers; their blithe explanation about guilt needing to be proved, not innocence – for miscarriages of justice can happen, she knows this. She hopes James Whitehouse is innocent. He has a wife and children, doesn’t he? What must it be like for them at the moment? She can barely imagine his poor wife’s horror. But if he didn’t do it, then Kate must lose – and she will be devastated.
She skims the copy. Only two years older than her; Old Etonian; Oxford – she vaguely knew that. Not accompanied by his wife. Curious that that’s mentioned. Her interest in his family, and in particular this wife, intensifies: now who would that be? She reaches for her iPad and taps in the key words feeling faintly grubby for she knows she partly wants to see if he is married to some appalling Sloane and half-hopes she is ugly – though she knows she is being unsisterly and it’s most unlikely.
And here his wife is, mentioned in some detail. ‘Mr Whitehouse’s wife, Sophie, granddaughter of the 6th Baron Greenaway of Whittington’ and a photo of her, clasping his hand and looking haughtily towards the camera: long dark hair flying; wide blue eyes lit with a potent combination of contempt, resentment and, perhaps, just a flicker of fear.
Her insides loosen and her heart ricochets. She knows that face. She knows that woman. More mature here, yes, and more groomed, but still instantly recognisable. Last seen across a college dining hall, dressed in rowing kit, no doubt, or a strappy top and tiny cut-off jeans. It would have been post-finals: that balmy June when they did nothing but punt and picnic in the University Parks. She can see this girl now: head tossed back as she laughed, playing croquet in the quad; voice rising confidently above her peers: a beautiful voice – well-modulated, honeyed but occasionally marred by that ever-so-slightly-too-loud cry of laughter. A cry of entitlement.
Sophie Greenaway: that’s who this is. One of the beautiful ones who slipped effortlessly into college life, who barely wasted their time with those not from their background, who knew intrinsically, without it needing to be spelled out, almost as if they could smell it, who wasn’t destined for their set. The girls who read history of art or English or classics: nothing precise or useful, still less scientific, for gaining a career immediately after university, still less paying off any debts, wasn’t a priority. Oxford was about the experience: the all-round education – though some managed to become accountants or management consultants, hard pragmatism asserting itself in their final year.
Sophie would have barely glanced at Ali, or Alison as she called herself then, in the mistaken belief that it sounded more adult. So why did Ali remember her better than the other girls who would have ignored her? Why sense some connection there?
She knows the answer before she makes her way to the downstairs loo where her matriculation photo is hung in a way that, she hopes, seems ironic.
And there it is. The proof she is desperate not to see. Hidden among the open faces of all those eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds with their heavy fringes and their soft, mousy hair; those identically dressed teenagers in their subfusc, the uniform of exams and matriculation, the formal ceremony at the start of their degrees: white shirts, white ties; black ribbons for the girls; black gowns; black mortar boards, upright on most; on the more confident, tipped jauntily.
There they are: two girls, their faces the size of fingerprints, dotted at either ends of a row stretching the length of the chapel; standing, she remembers it now, on a bench. Girls who were physically dissimilar – one plump; one slim – but who read the same subject and shared the same optimism: that sense that they were about to embark on a glorious three years. Like divers primed at the edge of a pool, they were poised for the most marvellous adventure – and the faces of Sophie and Holly shimmered with hope, not fear.
She looks at those faces now and she knows that there shouldn’t be a present-day connection. Natural justice tells her this – though she knows little of the ethics of the Bar.
Had Kate spoken to her about this? Her mind reels back to that conversation when she told her she was prosecuting James Whitehouse. Did she ever mention Sophie? Say anything like: ‘You’ll never guess whom he married?’ Or even venture that there was some sort of tenuous connection? She roots for that snippet of conversation; that sentence of admission that will tell her everything is all right; that Kate has this in hand; that everything is above board and she knows what she is doing. And yet she knows, with a chill certainty that makes the base of her spine tingle, that this never happened. That Kate never brought it up.
Her stomach closes in on itself as she worries away at the reason for this omission. Why would Kate not say something? Perhaps she didn’t know that James Whitehouse was married to the Sophie they knew at college? Although hadn’t Sophie gone out with a James, even then? She remembers a tall, broad-shouldered rower; thick hair shielding his eyes, flopping against his forehead; someone who would never have glanced at them on the rare occasions when they spied him running from Sophie’s room. The figure shimmies into view, forcing aside the flotsam and jetsam of life, from the deepest recesses of her memory. That must have been him.
Perhaps Kate just hadn’t realised; had somehow not made the connection; or, if she had, hadn’t thought it significant. She hadn’t known him even if she had known his student girlfriend, and so any link would be negligible, wouldn’t it?
And yet this doesn’t ring true. Kate with her colour-coded Post-its and her intricate essay plans; the sustained and forensic approach to cases; her always-impressive memory would have winkled out this connection. Would have discovered – even if she hadn’t initially remembered – that the man she was prosecuting had married a girl who had read the same subject as her at college and who had been her tutorial partner. That there had been a link between them; however tenuous, however brief.
So why didn’t she bring it up, or think it worth mentioning? There is one possible, perturbing, reason; the reason Ali’s insides are lanced with a frozen poker, fear shooting from her heart and down each limb.
She leans against the toilet wall, scrutinising all those faces and recalling names she had forgotten about until this moment; individuals she habitually dismissed in one black-and-white blur of familiarity but who had been there, witness to those golden years. Except that they hadn’t been golden for Kate, had they – or Holly as she was at that time? And she sees her dear friend, swamped in that unflattering hoodie, her eyes shot with red and with an unfamiliar deadness to them.
And she remembers what happened to her.
She had never told Ali who it was. When Ali had found her that lunchtime after the attack, she only admitted that it had happened. Someone from a different college, she said, and Ali had briefly thought it must be that boy from the student paper she had mentioned, Dan. Then she met him, a couple of days later, and Ali couldn’t square it: couldn’t imagine this skinny, silky-haired boy with his fine long fingers and his nervousness around her friend – in whom he was clearly very interested – as an aggressor; as someone capable of such an act.
For a rape had clearly taken place. Ali could see that. You didn’t have a reaction of this kind if you thought the act was consensual. A drunken knee-trembler you went along with because it was easier than saying no was one thing. But an act that led her to scour her body; to plunge herself into painfully hot water – for she had admitted obsessively washing herself afterwards – was entirely different. There was no ambiguity there.
She had told Holly to go to the police, or to contact the college’s women’s officer, though neither of them knew quite what she would do or if she had ever been confronted with this kind of problem. What about the junior dean? A young French lecturer, supposedly more in touch with student issues than many of the desiccated academics in her quad. But Holly had shaken her head vigorously. ‘It might have been my fault,’ she had whispered. ‘Perhaps I gave out the wrong signals. Perhaps I was ambiguous?’ She had looked at Ali for reassurance she couldn’t give, though she had tried: ‘Of course it wasn’t you; of course you didn’t.’ The words felt ineffectual. Of course Holly had blamed herself: for why, according to her thinking, would someone do that unless she had encouraged him?
She had remained steadfast in refusing to go to the police and Ali had understood that. Who would want to make a scene about it? To draw attention to herself? To risk having to retell her experience with the likelihood she would not be believed? Women had only recently entered the college and there was a sense that they shouldn’t rock the boat: why would she want to be forever known, by the college authorities, by her tutors, by the other students, as the girl who had cried rape?
She had shrunk into herself, this girl who had briefly blossomed. Who had evolved from the shy, slightly suspicious, sometimes-chippy student into a girl who had grabbed everything Oxford had to offer and clasped it tight with both hands. She stopped writing reviews for Cherwell, and attending Labour Party meetings; gave up singing in the college choir, where her voice was a deep, sought-after alto; abandoned her all-night stints for the telephone counselling service and retreated to her space at the end of a long oak table in the lower reading library, where she sat, protected by a defensive barrier built out of textbooks. If she ventured out at night, she clutched a rape alarm – a hard funnel that let out a high-pitched blast – but she rarely went beyond the library. There she hid: just the top of her head glimpsed behind her bookish barricade.
And when the second year began, she never returned. She wrote to Ali. Seems Oxford wasn’t for me. I couldn’t hack it. Only you know the reason. And that last sentence – and the memory of finding her afterwards; and of Holly protecting her earlier in the year, when she found her semi-conscious on the toilet and had pulled up her knickers, wiping the sick from her mouth, holding back her hair, meshed them together far more intensely than all the good times. She wrote straight back and they kept in touch; and when they both migrated to London their friendship deepened and strengthened even more.
She was Kate by then. Had become Kate during her absence: a harder, more elegant, almost unrecognisable version of Holly. It had happened gradually but by the time she had started her pupillage the metamorphosis was complete. This new version was more confident than the girl who had run back home to Liverpool: her voice deeper and more gentrified, all hint of an accent gone – the odd lilt only returning on the very rare occasions she got drunk and maudlin. She was glossy, poised, and rather humourless: highly focused on her work, with her poor boyfriend, or husband as he quickly became, very much her second priority. Ali had felt rather sorry for him: a perfectly lovely chap who lacked Kate’s clear ambition, her drive and tenacity. Was clearly a gentler character who she imagined had never suffered a setback in his robustly middle-class life.
They didn’t speak of what happened that night – for why would she want to be reminded? Only once, early on, had Ali raised the subject and she had been emphatically rebuffed.
‘And are you OK? About what happened?’
Kate had stared at her with wide cold eyes. ‘I really don’t want to talk about it.’
‘Of course not. I’m sorry.’ She had fumbled her way towards another topic, averting her eyes so that Kate wouldn’t spot her observing her flush.
‘That’s OK.’ Kate’s voice let in a chink of light, as if she was relenting: her tone so soft that Ali had to listen intently to catch what she was saying. ‘I just can’t go there.’
But if mentioning it was entirely unnecessary it was still there: an unacknowledged undercurrent. Hovering when Kate broke up with Alistair; when she went through her many barren periods, and when she lurched from one to another briefly held affair.
It might have happened over twenty years ago, but Holly’s rape had helped meld Kate into the woman she was. The catalyst that had made her pursue a career as a criminal barrister and the reason she preferred to prosecute. Ali sensed this, though Kate had never acknowledged it.
And now, is it possible that her private pain has overridden her professional judgement? Is it – just – conceivable that James Whitehouse is the man who raped her – and she has a very personal reason for prosecuting him? All Ali knows for sure is that, twenty-four years ago, Kate knew the woman who became his wife; that she hasn’t disclosed that; and that there has to be some reason for not doing this. The question niggles like an insect bite she knows she mustn’t scratch but which becomes more distracting the more she tries to resist it. She must think in tiny, logical steps: James went out with Sophie, Kate’s old tutorial partner, so perhaps he may have met her; he was certainly at Oxford at the same time as her. But it’s a huge jump from that to accusing him of her rape.
She leaves the downstairs cloakroom and the photo, with those youthful, trusting faces; tries to think calmly as she boils a kettle and, craving certainty and comfort, makes another mug of tea. It is just possible that Kate would keep quiet about a connection because of this sinister, shaming reason. She has never once revealed the name of her rapist and her intense privacy might explain this refusal, now. But there’s a steeliness, a stubbornness and a ruthlessness to her friend, as well, and if – and it’s a huge if – it was James Whitehouse who raped her then she is perfectly capable of pursuing him for what he did to her, that night – perhaps little caring if he is also guilty of this rape.
And where does that leave the poor woman accusing him now? If Kate is not focusing on her case but is driven by something else entirely? Her life will be being ripped apart in court, for God’s sake. She takes a deep breath. Surely Kate, forensic, disciplined Kate, won’t let herself by hijacked by her emotions but will manage to channel her anger and use it to win her case?
And what about Sophie? Ali’s heart swells. Poor, poor woman. Not some silly Sloane but someone she once knew, a woman not so unlike herself, with this terrible question at the heart of her marriage. What must it be like to live with – to sleep with – him? A memory rises of Sophie rushing through the lodge, pink spreading through her cheeks as she referred too frequently to ‘my boyfriend’. Now he is being tried at the Bailey and she isn’t going to watch. Does she suspect he’s done it before? Even if she doubts, she must be praying he gets off this time.
And then she thinks of her dearest friend; of Kate, and how, if she loses, she won’t just have lost a hugely high-profile case. She will have lost the chance of avenging her own rape; of destroying him just as he almost destroyed her.
If he gets off, it will tear his alleged victim apart. It might Sellotape Sophie’s world together.
But what will it do to Kate?