SOPHIE
27 April 2017
Twenty-three
The Devon mud pools in the lanes like spilled hot chocolate, running off the hills and dripping from the hedgerows where the hawthorn and brambles gleam.
The children love it. The clay-red puddles that spread across the potholed road and that cry out for Emily and Finn to splash one another with water: fat globules that pearl on waterproof trousers and coats. ‘He got me. Hey, you got me!’ Emily’s self-righteous tone morphs into delight as she retaliates and splatters her brother, red Hunter wellies stomping then can-canning as the puddles race across the muddied tarmac then eddy and whirl.
Sophie watches, not chastising them for once; not telling her daughter to try to keep clean, for what does it matter? They are showing an almost hysterical abandon – Em regressing to being a little girl, Finn far bolder and freer than he ever is at home. They are living by Devon rules now. The rules of their mildly eccentric, real-ale-drinking grandmother – for Ginny has swapped the G&Ts from which she drew her name and brews her own nettle beer. Or, rather, the usual rules have been relaxed to the point of being abandoned. No school; no routine; no Cristina; no Daddy. Only their mother remains a constant; and even she, as she would be the first to admit, is not behaving like she usually would.
They have been down here for two nights now. It is less than forty-eight hours since Sophie unexpectedly picked them up from school and brought them on this surprise Devon jaunt. The fourth day of the case: the third of evidence. A day when her husband’s terrifyingly expensive QC should rip the case against him more decisively apart. Oh God, she hopes she does. Her fingers cross in an involuntary tic and she uncrosses then crosses them again. There’s no need to be superstitious – and yet she can’t discount a thing; will cling to every single crutch.
‘Come on – let’s get to the beach,’ she calls to the children for she craves real exercise: a vigorous walk, not their aimless ambling. They lollop, wellies banging against their legs, feet starting to drag as the novelty of their splashing wears off and they grow warm.
Emily stops and holds her hat out for Sophie to carry.
‘No. You wanted to bring it, you carry it, Em.’
Her daughter gives a moue of disgust, rosebud bottom lip jutting out. ‘No,’ she insists.
‘All right then,’ she sighs, taking the soft wool with its bright Fairisle knit, and squeezing it into her coat pocket to Emily’s evident bemusement. She doesn’t want an argument. All her emotional energy is focused on holding herself and the children together and on getting through the next few days.
Because, tonight, she will have to return to London. Angela wants to put James in the box and if he gives evidence she must be there for him – at home even if she cannot make it to court. That’s the deal she struck, after a forthright conversation with Chris Clarke who made it clear that, if she continued to absent herself, her husband’s chances of political rehabilitation following an acquittal would grow even more slim. She was so close to saying she didn’t give a damn about James’s political rehabilitation at the moment. She is far too preoccupied with news of the trial and whether he is likely to get off.
She winces. The inside of her mouth is sore as if she has an ulcer. But no: she has been chewing it. She runs her tongue over the rough, broken edges; tastes the salt of her blood.
It’s no wonder she’s so stressed. Once the children are in bed, she logs on to the BBC news and the online newspapers, reading everything she can on the case in which James’s alleged crime is trumpeted loudly and Olivia is granted total anonymity: nameless, faceless, her job unidentified – which causes some gaps in the papers’ narrative as to how Miss X, or ‘the alleged victim’, as they keep referring to her, came to be in that lift. She has been obsessing about the evidence. Some – the bruise; even the ripped tights – she can just about discount. James is a passionate man: a love bite given a little too hard; tights tugged; knickers ripped – they’re all possible; all understandable, none of them sinister since they occurred in the heat of the moment. He desired Olivia after all.
She swallows, trying to stay rational, congratulating herself on remaining calm and on not thinking about the knickers: black, flimsy, unashamedly sexy; the sort of obvious underwear that would turn James on. She curbs herself from obsessing about that but she can’t stop fixating on one detail. That horrible phrase: Don’t be such a prick-tease. Not the sort of thing James would ever say. So why can’t she shrug it off? Perhaps it’s the fear that others will imagine him saying it: will think him capable of being that vicious and vulgar? Or perhaps it’s because he has used that word as a casual dismissal. Not to her, but of fellow men. ‘He’s such a prick,’ he has said of Matt Frisk and Malcolm Thwaites. Perhaps even of Chris Clarke. An airy dismissal. But never used in relation to women or in a way that was sexual. Never prick-tease. It’s not the same, is it? In any way at all?
She needs to stop this. ‘Come on. Let’s run,’ she calls to the children, then powers up the sand dunes, trying to shake this niggling anxiety. The wind is picking up now: a brisk inshore breeze that ruddies Finn’s cheeks and makes Emily smile, unselfconscious, as they scale the slippery dunes then charge down to the sea.
She picks her way through the shore’s debris – driftwood, fishing rope, the odd message-less glass bottle – then gazes at the view, trying to empty her mind of worries. A small island rises from the water, cut off from the land at all but low tide. Burgh Island: the spot where Agatha Christie hid herself away to write And Then There Were None and found the seclusion demanded by the novel. If only she could cut herself off in the same way.
She has tried. Oh, how she has tried. There are no shops in the crease of this valley and no Wi-Fi; and so, in the day, she has managed to avoid all news and emails; to pretend – at least to the children – that the events in court two of the Bailey do not exist. She is not managing today. Last night was spent hunched over her laptop: a large G&T at her side, for her mother has not abandoned her old tipple entirely; a cold knot in her stomach, as she read on, compulsively. The fear spread through her bowels and down her limbs: what was described – the bruise; the ripped knickers; that horrible, menacing put-down . . . well, it chilled her entirely.
She will leave the children here. No need to take them back to London. To force them to experience what she must go through. The possibility that he will not be acquitted, the fear – which inhabits her every waking moment – that Olivia’s testimony will be believed and her husband convicted of rape.
Her throat thickens. She cannot believe it. She will not let herself believe it. James might be a passionate man: an assertive man; even a forceful man, sexually – someone who wants sex more frequently than her and will sometimes pester her for it, if she is completely honest. But he has always stopped whenever she has said no; has always accepted when she hasn’t wanted it.
The children race across the beach. Two flashes of red and blue like kites caught on the breeze and blustered: wheeling and whirring in a blur of fierce energy. Her heart swells and the sight of them steadies her for these are his children and they reassure her so that she is suddenly filled with certainty: someone involved in their creation could never be capable of rape.
This nightmare is the revenge of a woman scorned who went to the papers and then found herself in far deeper waters – the Crown Prosecution Service pushing a case even though, as she implied yesterday in cross-examination, or so Sophie choses to read the evidence, she later had reservations about this.
‘I loved him and I wanted him.’ That was what Olivia had admitted, when questioned about the moments in the lift. Sophie knows what it is like to feel such desire for James. She understands, too, her intense, flinty jealousy at the thought of him with another woman; and the humiliation that would have provoked her to fatally, stupidly, seek the sweet, quick gratification of revenge.
The case should never have been brought. That is the line they will be pushing when he is acquitted. She can hear Chris Clarke practising it. Honing a terse statement that will lay the blame with a CPS that had the audacity to pursue a groundless case because it was deemed politically expedient while countless real criminals have gone undetected and unpunished.
She walks more briskly, buoyed by this idea, and thinks of some of the things she experienced before her marriage. The blurring of consent in her days of sixth-form parties when boys would try anything on and sometimes it was easier just to acquiesce. She is not saying that those boys were in the right – and she would hate this to happen to Em – but these days she could accuse them of rape, or at the least of sexual assault, when what they were guilty of was a selfish exuberance and what she was guilty of – for she was complicit in this too – was a lack of communication. An inability to stand up to them and say: ‘I don’t want that. Please, don’t do that to me.’
She is all too aware of the legal definition of rape. That it can only be proved if the jury is satisfied that her husband knew, at the point of penetration, that Olivia did not consent. And why would James do that if he knew this? He might be passionate, reckless, assertive but he is not brutish; and Olivia has admitted that she wanted him; that they collided, the kiss being consensual; that she willingly went in the lift.
Her heart lightens as she runs through these facts. This is an instance of political correctness gone mad. She can imagine the Daily Mail leader after his acquittal and she tries to smile as she walks the stretch of the beach towards her children, who are now throwing slivers of slate at the gun-metal sea. Her husband is far from perfect. He gave mixed messages. He was unfaithful, yes; callous even – for she has no doubt he had no intention of resuming his relationship with Olivia and that he would have been using her in that moment. But he is not a rapist. Common sense – and the law – dictates that he has to be let off this life-destroying charge, doesn’t it?
She will feel better when she sees him. When they talk, face-to-face, and she can read the expression in his eyes clearly. Newspapers will always sensationalise and focus on a detail that distorts things. Don’t be such a prick-tease. She tastes the menace of the words on her lips.
‘Mummy, Mummy!’ Em’s voice drags her from her thoughts, as she reaches them, scavenging on the shoreline. She is holding out what looks like a tiny cockleshell, except that it is blooded.
‘Look!’ Em gives a smile that looks unfamiliar. ‘My wobbly tooth came out!’
She takes the pearly nub from her daughter; further evidence that she is losing her last traces of babyhood; that she is growing up fast.
‘Will the tooth fairy find me in Devon? Will she be like Father Christmas?’
She looks at Em closely. She is nine. Too old to believe in either the tooth fairy or Father Christmas, although she is canny; knows she will only get shiny pound coins and fat stockings if she plays along with the myth. Or perhaps she is like her mother: determined to believe something because it’s the happier, if less credible, explanation? Emily believes in the tooth fairy, just as Sophie believes that James couldn’t have used that phrase, because it’s what she so desperately wants to believe.
She clears her throat. ‘I’m sure she’ll find you,’ she says, over-brightly. ‘Perhaps you could write her a letter to put under your pillow explaining that it’s still you even though you’re down here?’
‘But she’ll know that anyway,’ Finn says, his face cloaked in a six-year-old’s confusion. ‘She’ll recognise the tooth, remember, because she’s Tabitha, Em’s special tooth fairy.’
‘Oh, of course she will.’ She had forgotten the tangled web she’d spun when the last tooth was lost, in Cornwall, the previous summer. ‘Silly mummy to forget.’
The lies we tell, she thinks: to ease things, to make life more palatable. Father Christmas; the tooth fairy; a husband who would never knowingly rape someone – and he couldn’t, she just knows he couldn’t; would never utter that phrase to another woman, a woman with whom he had previously had sex.
She wraps her arms around her daughter, feeling her ribs beneath her fleece, no hint of a dip of a waist; no sense that she will one day be a woman; and breathes in the smell of her soft hair, wanting to physically stop her growing older.
‘What’s that for?’ Em wriggles, spiky and suspicious.
‘Do I have to have a reason?’ She pulls away with a smile, saddened by her daughter’s response but conscious of remaining perky. ‘Oh, perhaps I haven’t hugged you enough today.’
‘Or me.’ Finn worms his way between them, sibling rivalry and his need to be loved the forces that drive him; that ensure that, time and again, he is at the heart of any embrace.
For one long, sweet moment they stand there, as the tide licks around their wellies: Em’s hands round her waist; Finn’s head nuzzled between her breasts; her arms close around them. Then she pulls away. Mustn’t scare them. Mustn’t overwhelm them with emotion; draining their love from them, but must pull herself together, for their sakes. And for her sake.
‘Come on,’ she orders, looking up as she brushes down her jeans, giving herself a moment to avoid Em’s quizzical gaze, to compose herself so that she is their firm, no-nonsense mummy. ‘Let’s wrap that tooth up safe and head in. Time for hot chocolate. It looks like it’s going to rain.’
On cue, the charcoal sky rumbles and the sand is splattered with fat droplets that dot-to-dot, turning the blonde sand golden. The children look up, wordless; then start running in.
‘Who’s first back?’ she calls.
Emily is in the lead; Finn, frantic to catch up, as always. A squeal then a bubble of laughter drifts down the beach.
She must try to mimic their childish ability to live in the moment: to clutch at moments of happiness, standing here, in the rain on this Devon beach. And so she follows, feet sinking into the mounds of sand, cheeks licked by the now-slick rain; trying to ignore the all-pervading sickness at the pit of her stomach; the phrase that echoes like a mantra: a fixed smile on her face; her heart, a pebble of grief.