KATE
26 May 2017
Thirty
It is over three weeks since the trial and I am standing on Waterloo Bridge: the place that usually lifts me. The end of the week and the pavements are emptying as my fellow workers race to make the most of a balmy weekend.
I’m watching a stunner of a sunset: mango sorbet, shot through with raspberry ripple and laced with streaks of caramel. The sort of sky that makes people whip out their smartphones to capture its glory; or just stop, as I am, and stare.
Beside me, a young Spanish couple is kissing. This is a sky to make you want to do that: to grasp the person you love and be spontaneous: show the intensity of your feelings, your giddiness and excitement at the inexplicable beauty of life.
No one’s wrapping me in a passionate clinch. Earth has not anything to show more fair than this, and yet the sunset and the view leaves me numb. St Paul’s, Canary Wharf and the concrete sprawl of the National Theatre to the east; the giddy Ferris wheel of The Eye to the west, all pass me by. I can’t help but home in on a golden Gothic building, perhaps the most iconic part of the river: Big Ben and the House of Commons. The mother of parliaments.
Even without this visual reminder, James Whitehouse is always at the back of my mind and, as I lie in bed at night, right at the forefront. My debilitating grief has diminished, but it still consumes me: a dull ache that becomes pin-sharp to ambush me at the very worst of times.
No one would know this, of course. I am as coolly competent as ever, though in the immediate aftermath my anger was palpable. ‘It was always going to be a long shot, convicting the PM’s best mate, and at least you kept them thinking,’ my junior, Tim Sharples, tried to reassure me, straight after the verdict. I remember trying to ram my wig and documents into my case, and atypically swearing as the zip jammed. The effort of not crying, as Angela swanned out, and Tim watched, unable to think of a quick line, felt immense. ‘It’s just one case,’ he said, though we all knew it wasn’t just one case: it was supposed to be the case that would confirm the wisdom of me making QC so early; that meant no one would raise an eyebrow at the speed of my appointment. ‘There’ll be plenty more.’
There are, and I have done what I do: dust myself down, and carry on working, prosecuting those accused of the foulest of sexual crimes. I am hungry for work because if I fill every crevice of my brain I can try to stop obsessing about the quality of my cross-examination and the parallels between Olivia’s and my experience. That’s the theory. In practice, it rarely works.
I look up: check that the kissing couple hasn’t noticed my bright eyes, which sting with self-pity. Of course not: faces pressed against one another, they are wrapped up entirely in themselves. Besides, I am unremarkable, even in court. ‘Polly? Molly?’ A wave of hate swells and I wonder if that journalist, Jim Stephens, is delving into James’s Oxford past. Were there other girls like me? There were rumours of parties where drinks were spiked. Omerta of the Libertines? But someone, somewhere, must have an incriminating photo? I offer a prayer, eyes squeezed tight, that James will get his come-uppance; will experience the most intense humiliation. That he won’t get away with doing this, to me and Olivia and whoever else it may have happened to, in the long term.
The sun has disappeared, now: a hot ball of fire that has slipped from sight leaving the sky bereft and no longer dazzled, the raspberry pink fading to a pinky-grey. Life moves on, or so I keep telling myself, though it’s something that, with my obsessive mindset, I’m struggling to believe.
And yet, rationally, I know it’s true. There’s a fresh bout of news and even a new political scandal: Malcolm Thwaites, Tory chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee, has been caught paying young male prostitutes for sex. The details – threesomes, poppers, explicit texts – make James Whitehouse’s sex in a lift, for that, the jury ruled, is all that occurred, look positively tame. And the timing is fortunate. What a coincidence that another political sex scandal should be exposed the weekend after the prime minister’s best friend was cleared? Politics is a dirty business and I could almost feel sorry for Mr Thwaites. I give it less than a year before James Whitehouse is given a junior ministerial role and welcomed back to the lowly ranks of government again.
I must not let myself get bitter. I can feel the sour taste of it in my mouth; sense it seeping through me. Somehow, it seems preferable to despair. I know my anger needs to be boxed up: hard; finite; precious, like an indulgent cocktail ring buried deep in a drawer and rarely worn. I can’t manage that yet. In the meantime, I run. Six a.m. sees me streaking down to the Chelsea Embankment, over the river and through Battersea Park. The day is brim-filled with possibility, then, and seven kilometres in, I feel a brief, sweet shot of serotonin. In the evening, I do less well: tend my pain with baths and gin.
I walk slowly back towards the Strand. Gin and a bath tonight, a run early tomorrow morning. The Bank Holiday weekend stretches, a desert of loneliness except for the oasis that is Ali. Thank God I’ve been invited to Sunday lunch at hers, again.
I long for the fierceness of her hug as she greets me in her narrow hall; crave her warmth; her quiet sympathy; the knowledge that she is angry, too: her fury erupting in the swear words she used prolifically as a student but, since becoming a teacher and mother, she has largely put away. The night of the verdict she came round and stayed; held me as I shook with grief; listened as I raged against him; stopped me from obliterating myself with drink. We talked as we should have twenty-four years before; and when I finished – my throat hoarse; my body aching with exhaustion – she lay down next to me and curled behind me as I tried to sleep.
I have seen her every week since then and her family must be sick of me, must wonder why the previously elusive Kate now sits red-eyed in their kitchen; why their mum seems to have someone else to worry about these days.
But I need her. It is only with Ali that I can be myself completely. It is only she who remembers Holly.