SOPHIE
22 July 2017
Thirty-one
When the letter comes with the invitation to her college gaudy, she initially dismisses it. A Saturday night in July: a night away from the children; the best part of a weekend devoted to something entirely for herself.
Besides which, she would have to brave seeing people: risking the likelihood of them gossiping about James or ostentatiously avoiding doing so: her husband and his court case, and by implication the state of her marriage, the elephant blundering around the room.
But she doesn’t throw the heavy card with its embossed college shield and cursive font in the bin or place it in the fireplace and so it sits on the mantelpiece: the RSVP date a couple of months away.
‘Why don’t you go?’ James asks. ‘The children can stay with my parents.’ For, even with Cristina on hand, there is no question of him looking after them for the weekend.
‘I couldn’t,’ she says, reluctant to point out the obvious: that he is the reason she will no longer put herself in new situations; situations in which she will have to sound assertive and perky as she gives new acquaintances, or old ones, a résumé of her life. Yes, she’s married to James; they live in North Ken; have two gorgeous children. A version of the truth, but one painted in primary colours with broad brushstrokes that allow no room for nuance or detail: a version Finn or any other six-year-old could create.
And yet the possibility of returning to her old college remains: the invitation taunting her from its spot beside a silver picture frame on the mantelpiece. Sophie Greenaway, it says at the top of the invitation, and she finds herself rooting out old photos of that girl. There she is with Alex and Jules in their lycras, flushed and exuberant after the rowing race, Torpids; and, here, sitting outside the King’s Arms, at the end of finals, her relief palpable, her gown splattered with the traditional eggs and flour. She rifles for more: a second-year party in that shared house in Park Town, her swigging a bottle of Bud as she tossed her hair back, the look on her face a challenge: come and get me if you think you’re good enough. The photo grounds her in the mid to late 90s: silver hoops in her ears; a leotard-like ‘body’; lips slick with lip gloss and brows not tamed with tweezers; a self-confidence she can barely recognise.
James is absent from most of these photos: their Oxford life one that was played out at night, largely in his college, and only in her first year. Though she associates Oxford with him, she spent more of her time there alone. Shrewsbury College was her college, and there is a strong part of her that hankers after that girl, who wasn’t defined by a charismatic boyfriend; and who, now, wants to reclaim her. Wants to recapture the spirit of Sophie Greenaway.
It tallies with her desire to become more assertive, to build a stronger self, away from James’s shadow, for her old self has fractured since the court case, and she is changing more evidently than he. Their marriage is a precarious construction. On the surface, all might seem stable: they are courteous to one another, perhaps excessively, cautiously so; and he is unusually attentive – listening to her opinions, or giving the semblance of doing so; buying her flowers; keen to indicate that he is interested only in her; that there is no future Olivia in the wings.
And yet, the foundations of their marriage are no longer strong; the map by which they have negotiated it no longer certain. Her husband is a stranger; or rather she is having to accept a darker, half-recognised version of him. At times, her anger is a fist that unfurls as she derides herself as someone so weak that he knew he could confess to lying and be confident that he would not be betrayed. At other times, she tries to kid herself about his behaviour: to demonise Olivia or indulge his sophistry. To forge an explanation that allows him to be mistaken rather than callous and cavalier.
It is bearable for James, she thinks in her deepest moments of self-loathing. He doesn’t recognise that he did anything wrong. He genuinely seems to believe that Olivia was playing a game and his version of the truth is the only one that matters. Whereas she is tormented by his admission: those crucial details of what happened in the lift.
His life is returning to normal, his constituency work preoccupying him as well as his behind-the-scenes advice to the prime minister, the bond still strong although Tom is sufficiently politically astute not to be seen with him in public yet. Even that he anticipates changing. ‘It will come,’ James reassures her, his smile stoked by an inner confidence; an awareness of the skeins of history that bind them tight.
She is the one who must brave the outside world: the smiles at the school gate, the faux congratulations from other women whom she knows wished her ill, as well as those that she hopes are more genuine. Her part of London is a village and she imagines the whispers following her at the gym, the chemist’s, the supermarket, the coffee shops, the dry-cleaner’s. She avoids all of these. Act naturally, she tells herself. And yet shame floods her veins. She is tainted by association. He may have been acquitted – an innocent man; a free man – and yet the whole world knows he has cheated while she knows he has lied and raped.
Most of the time she carries this knowledge quietly, her heart aching with a sad resignation. And then it threatens to erupt – that closed fist searching for something to strike at, wildly – and she has to exercise aggressively, pounding the streets or using a rowing machine set up in the spare room when she began to shun the gym. It is only then, when she feels her heart strain, fit to burst, and she pushes herself until her chest burns that she gains some sense of equilibrium; physical exhaustion and the near-unbearable sensation of almost blacking out with the effort forcing all other sentiments away.
A therapist is helping a little too. It was Ginny’s idea: something Sophie would never have considered, would have viewed as hugely self-indulgent had her mother not confessed to seeing someone after Max left and revealed that she found it useful. ‘Just having someone non-judgemental to talk to might help,’ she had said.
James knew but pretended he didn’t.
‘I don’t want to hear any details.’ He had looked severe. She had been bewildered. Why on earth would I tell you, she had wanted to say?
Of course there is far too much that she cannot tell. Huge truths that remain unsaid: strings of words considered and dismissed out of hand before each session: my husband lied in court about raping another woman and I don’t know what to do about it.
All of which makes it challenging when faced with Peggy, her grey-haired, apparently humourless therapist. The first session passes in near silence, Sophie censoring each brief sentence, as does the second until Peggy raises an eyebrow at some brief reference to her father – and Sophie fills the best part of an hour with tears. Great ugly sobs blotch her face and leave her clutching a clump of sodden tissues, confounded at the intensity of emotion that her memories have unleashed. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she keeps saying, as she blows away the snot that bubbles up. She is as inconsolable as Finn when his team is defeated at football. ‘I don’t know what’s come over me.’
As part of boosting her self-esteem, Peggy challenges her to go to the college reunion.
‘What’s the worst thing that could happen?’
‘They could not like me. They might judge me,’ Sophie whispers, thinking: if you knew, you would judge. You would think me weak; complicit in what he has done; as self-serving and morally compromised as James.
‘Or they might not,’ Peggy says, and tucks a hank of her bob behind her ear. Sophie waits: watching her therapist watch her and hoping that she will soon break the silence that grows embarrassing the longer it stretches.
Peggy shrugs; is disobliging.
‘I suppose they might not,’ Sophie eventually says.
And so that is how she comes to be back at Shrewsbury College. She is in a room in Old Quad. A superior room to the one that she had during finals: dark oak panelling, a huge partner’s desk topped with aged green leather; and, in the cell-like bedroom, a single bed.
She traces her stomach – concave now for the stress of the past nine months has eaten her up so that her hip bones protrude and her little black dress no longer clings but hangs, exposing the glockenspiel of her clavicle and ribs. Her palms are moist and, as she washes her hands, she watches her loose rings glint in the running water, the gloss of her newly manicured nails gleam. They are the hands of a different woman entirely: those of the old Sophie, whose biggest preoccupation was when to fit in her gym sessions and what to cook if they were inviting friends for dinner. Or how best to handle the disparity in the size of sexual appetite between herself and James.
She shrugs the thought aside – and with it the memory of compromises made – and leans against the window to watch as her peers stroll across the quad for drinks before dinner. They are all forty-two or forty-three: at the prime of their life but also conscious that they have responsibilities – children, mortgages, ageing parents; will soon be hurtling towards middle age. And yet they are ageing well. That’s what relative wealth and a decent education does for you, she thinks, although such things have never been in doubt for her: she has always assumed that she will remain slim, active, fit; just as her going to university was taken as read. Upright, self-confident, self-assured, they look as if they still have the world at their feet – just as they did nearly twenty-five years ago, when they first entered this quad, some conscious of being the brightest stars of their generation, others taking it for granted. Lucky buggers, her father, uncharacteristically dropping her off at the start of that first term, had said.
Now they are old enough to have weathered difficulties and harboured secrets: to have suffered divorce, bereavement, infertility, redundancy, depression. The stresses and strains accrued over forty years. She knows one of their year has died – an accident in a South African safari park with a rifle – and that another has suffered from cancer. But is there anyone else who has been charged with a criminal offence? She scours the figures – some with the makings of a paunch; a couple more sleek than she remembers – and she doubts it. A drink-driving offence, perhaps, or a white-collar crime, like fraud? No one else will have a husband who has undergone a trial for rape.
Her hands start to shake now. What was she thinking of, coming here? The painful memory of the end of her first summer term weighs upon her, magnified through the prism of James’s case. She remembers the dread of something terrible happening to him and his intense fear after being questioned by the police; recalls the horror as the news spread through the university; her uncomprehending distress when James very quickly pushed her away.
Why has she risked stirring up these memories as well as exposing herself to condemnation? Once the drinks start to flow, there is bound to be someone who takes great pleasure in being controversial. Who asks, of the case: ‘And what did you think, Sophie? Did you always think he was innocent? Was there never any doubt in your mind?’
She has prepared herself; practised the laugh to ward off the conversational tumbleweed; rehearsed her lines, even. ‘Of course I never doubted him. Do you think I could stay with him, if I did?’
She will play the loyal wife, as she reassured his mother; as she needs to do for his children.
She hasn’t worked out a different role yet.
The candles cast soft pools of light around the mahogany tables and illuminate the faces of those talking over them, flattering them so that the years erode and they could be a decade younger: no longer students, but late twentysomethings for whom university is still touching distance away.
They have moved on to the port. A full-bodied, semi-dry vintage that slips down all too easily and that she knows she drinks out of nostalgia. One balmy summer’s night, after trying it for the first time, she had lain in the centre of Old Quad, ignoring the tiny signs about not stepping on the grass. The sky was pricked with crystals and the buildings stretched to the heavens. She remembered the damp of the dew against her bare legs; the way her skirt rose up; and someone – possibly Nick from their English group – bending over and giving her the gentlest kiss. For a split second, it had felt intensely romantic and then she had felt a surge of nausea.
Whoever it was had laughed, pulled her to her feet and led her to a toilet at the bottom of a staircase where he had waited, patiently, while she was efficiently sick.
‘You should have some water,’ he had said, when she emerged, shame-faced and grateful. ‘I’ll see you around when you’re feeling better. Are you sure you’re OK?’
She had nodded, swaying, her vision blurring.
‘And get some sleep.’
She wondered, now, who that was. That decent, half-remembered boy who had shown her that kindness; who had stepped away when it was clear that she was incapable of being amorous. For many wouldn’t and it perturbs her that she doesn’t find this shocking; that she takes it as read that she was lucky not to have woken to find her pants shoved aside.
She looks around the room and catches the eye of Paul. Perhaps it was him? There had been one brief, furtive snog in freshers’ week. The wrong type: a biochemist from a Kent grammar school; bright not sporty, she had known instinctively that there was too much that was different – though there had been that flinty spark of sexual chemistry. Perhaps that wasn’t such a bad start, she thinks now. He had been funny and good-looking, too. What was she thinking? A different version of her life shimmers: a mirage, elusive; intangible, yet glimpsed, there on the horizon. She had thought herself so clever in choosing James. She’d been so smug, but there were other men she could have chosen. And none of them would have stood trial at the Old Bailey; none would have lied on oath then privately admitted to being a rapist; and placed the burden of that knowledge on her.
She takes a heavy sip of port; feels the heat warm her throat; picks up a marzipan fruit and nibbles at its sweetness; trying to focus on the moment and to push such thoughts away.
‘Would you mind passing the port?’ a voice to her left asks.
‘Sorry – sorry.’ She is briefly befuddled then fills Alex’s glass, to her right, and passes the heavy decanter to her left.
The owner of the voice: dark, chiselled, good-humoured, is Rob Phillips, an old boyfriend of Alex’s; now a lawyer; someone she last saw at one of those turn-of-the-millennium weddings; not married, she sees now from the dent on his ringless left hand; but not, as she recalls, gay.
‘So – how are you holding up?’ he asks, turning towards her, his voice filled with an intimate warmth as if he is asking because he is interested and not merely being kind.
‘Oh, fine. Great. Lovely to be here – even if the Beef Wellington isn’t as good as I remembered.’
He chuckles, indulging her disingenuity.
‘I’m really glad I returned,’ she adds. ‘It is lovely to be here.’
And she is grateful for this moment in time; this chance to indulge in nostalgia; this possibility of escapism. She looks at the heavy oils gracing the walls, the portraits of Tudor benefactors and illustrious alumni, and at the well-natured, smiling faces of her peers, all doing well or managing to cope with whatever life has thrown at them, and breathes deeply, feeling the skin across her stomach stretch tight. She is full for once and finally beginning to relax.
‘I didn’t mean how you found the Beef Wellington,’ says Rob; and she can feel his eyes watching her.
‘Oh, I know you didn’t.’ She cannot look at him and so she fiddles with a dessert fork, turning it this way and that as she waits for him to take the hint and look away.
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to intrude. Let’s talk about the weather. Or where you’re going on holiday. Are you going on holiday?’ he asks.
‘To France – and to Devon, near my mother’s.’
‘Ah – wonderful. Whereabouts?’ And they shift into a less troublesome conversational vein: the best beaches in the South Hams; the merits of going out of season; the infuriating traffic jams down those steep-banked hedgerowed lanes. She hears her voice revert to being the bright, perky voice of Sophie Whitehouse, used for the few constituency events she attends, and those awful conference drinks and fundraising dinners. A glossy voice filled with privilege that has never known any emotional let alone financial or physical trauma; that keeps things light, skating over the difficulties of life. She can chat like this for hours but just as she begins to hanker for something less superficial, a discussion about politics even – though without mentioning James – he looks at her intently, and says: ‘You know, if you ever need someone to talk to, I can help.’
She stiffens: feels her heart flutter against her ribs, her stomach flip. Is this a proposition?
‘I . . . I’m fine, thank you.’ She recoils, like a Jane Austen spinster, alert to and fearful of intrigue.
He smiles as if he should have anticipated this reaction.
‘I didn’t mean . . . I just meant – look, this is probably completely uncalled for, and crass of me to mention it, but I know a good divorce lawyer, should you ever think you need one.’ He smiles and all the artifice of their conversation is stripped away. She looks at him directly: detects in those dark eyes both a need for practicality and a frank awareness that fairytale marriages are anything but. That until death us do part need no longer bind.
‘Are you a divorce lawyer?’
‘No. I’m not hustling for work. Jo and I got divorced two years ago and I used a colleague. She was very good: made things easier than they might have been. Look – here’s my card.’ He fumbles in his wallet, and hands her a crisp, thick rectangle. ‘Sorry. Not my place. Just – you know. I’ve been there. The endless compromises you make in a marriage. The attempts to fix something that perhaps can’t be fixed.’ He grimaces, his movements exaggerated now and comic: the self-deprecating Englishman taken to extremes. It is effective and endearing and she can’t help softening.
‘Thank you – but I don’t anticipate calling,’ she manages, and is surprised that her voice is firm and clear.
He shrugs as if to say there are no hard feelings and returns to the wine glass, swilling the dregs. After a short interval, she switches to Alex – a successful management consultant and new mother now, who is showing off pictures of her one-year-old twins, born through IVF.
‘Oh, they are adorable, Alex.’
Her friend beams with pride, embarks on a lengthy anecdote about their precocious speech – tedious and yet the glow on Alex’s face makes it bearable – and she tries to ignore Rob’s suggestion which prods like an insistent toddler. Divorce. The endless compromises made in a marriage. A lawyer who made things easier than they might have been.
Beside her, Rob starts a conversation with Andrea, a woman she barely recognises, who is sitting opposite. Their voices swell and rise and she sips her red wine, feeling the room grow warmer and still more intimate; leaning against Alex – now talking about her babies’ sophisticated palates – feeling the warmth of her friend’s arm against hers, recalling a friendship that might be rekindled after all these years.
At one point, she senses that someone is looking at her. She looks up and diagonally across two tables sees a woman’s face: dark eyes; blonde hair in an ill-kempt bob; an unsmiling mouth that fails to twitch in recognition or display any warmth when she smiles back. Odd. Her smile falters as the woman turns away.
Alex is still talking and so she slips back into listening, offering approval when required, umming and ahhing, while marvelling at the happiness her friend accepts unthinkingly. She felt like that when Emily was born and James was smitten with his first experience of fatherhood. Then again, more acutely, after Finn’s birth. Such brief, precious slivers of time.
Her mind rambles, fretting about that woman – her head now hidden behind a thick bank of dinner jackets – and about Rob who has unleashed a perturbing train of thoughts with his intervention. Divorce. The endless compromise.
It is only when she is sure that he is not looking that she takes the card and slips it into her purse.
Later, much later, they spill out into the quad. It is past midnight and many of them are making for bed, a couple, she notes with amusement, with one another: a second-year romance rekindled, if only for one night.
Rob waves a cheery farewell. ‘Sorry if I overstepped the mark,’ he begins but she cuts him short. ‘Not at all. No need to apologise.’ Her tone, polite, detached, is that same she uses with constituents who persist in ringing them at Thurlsdon, desperate for James’s attention. Rob half-raises his hand, revealing a crumpled dress shirt – it is that time of night – and disappears up a Gothic staircase in the corner of the quad.
‘Heading for the bar?’ Alex tucks her arm into hers and they make their way around the lawn. The night is warm; the stars as bright as she remembers them on that night when she lay in the dew and watched them spinning; and, as she looks up, she stumbles, the drink telling on her – or perhaps this bout of nostalgia; this sense of other, lost versions of her life.
‘You all right?’ Alex holds her steady as she puts her shoe back on, squeezing her hand.
‘Sorry, yes.’ The gentleness of her hand-holding, of this easily resumed friendship, stirs her to tears. They haven’t talked of James. She imagines chatting into the early hours then realises that’s impossible – because how can she risk opening up to anyone about him?
‘I’ll be with you in a second. I just need a couple of minutes.’
‘If you’re sure? What can I get you? A half cider for old time’s sake? Or a bottle of Bud, wasn’t that what you used to drink?’
She hasn’t drunk beer for years.
‘Actually, please could I have a single malt with ice?’
‘Well – if you’re sure?’
‘Honestly. I promise I’ll be down in a couple of minutes. I just need to sit here for a bit to think things over.’
Alex’s eyes soften. She is no fool; and suddenly Sophie cannot bear her pity.
‘Promise?’
‘I promise.’
‘Well, then. I’ll see you in a bit.’ And her old friend slips across the grass.
For a while she just sits, on a bench tucked away in the corner of the quad, watching them drift to the bar or off to the JCR. The old cliques have reasserted themselves: the science geeks barely speaking to the arts graduates; the past snobberies still prevalent – though it is the geeks who run the world now, the historians and English graduates all teachers and journalists unless they have become management consultants or accountants on graduation, their artistic leanings boxed away.
The bench is solid beneath her thighs; and the chill takes the edge off her giddiness as she tries to focus on those who are near her, and to imagine the eighteen-year-olds haunting their middle-aged selves. Some have barely changed; a few are unrecognisable: the bleached hair or the dreadlocks sported until they started attending job interviews now tamed into neat bobs and receding short-back-and-sides.
As the figures ebb away, she becomes conscious of someone sitting down beside her. She glances at this intruder and feels that creep of trepidation. It is the woman who glowered at her at dinner and she still isn’t smiling but gives a long, laboured sigh.
‘I’m so sorry – I’m afraid I can’t remember your name.’ Sophie tries to assert control of the situation.
‘Ali. Ali Jessop. Alison at college. I thought it made me sound more adult.’ The woman turns to look at her directly, and Sophie sees that she is quite tipsy, her eyes bloodshot and lit with a curious, unnerving fire.
‘Don’t worry. You didn’t know me.’ Ali seems to read her mind. ‘I wasn’t one of the beautiful ones. I read maths: not your subject.’
‘Oh.’ She tries to relax but there is a layer of resentment anchoring this woman’s voice. Did she once slight her or is she one of those women who unaccountably resent those who are more attractive than themselves? Perhaps she feels out of place: bad roots in a mumsy bob; a little overweight? Her thin black tights have a ladder racing up her calf that she doesn’t seem to have noticed. Sophie would always notice. She clutches at these possibilities before considering the likelihood that this is the person with whom she will have to spar this evening: not a domineering PPE graduate jealous of her husband, but some earnest Labour supporter.
‘I’m so sorry I don’t remember you,’ she manages. ‘I’m hopeless with names. Did we have friends in common?’
‘Oh yes.’ Ali draws the syllables out in a bitter, guttural laugh. ‘Do you remember Holly? Holly Berry?’
Her scalp tightens with that sense of premonition and the image of a girl half-remembered – and thought of only recently.
‘Yes. Yes, of course. In fact I was only thinking of her a few months ago. Someone reminded me of her.’
‘Your old tutorial partner.’
‘Yes, briefly. We were quite friendly that first term and then she left, suddenly, at the end of the first year. I never knew why.’ She pauses. ‘I’m sorry. I hadn’t realised you were friends.’
‘Why would you? You didn’t remember me in the least.’
‘No, well, quite.’ She is wrong-footed and tries to steer the conversation into less belligerent waters. ‘Is she well? Are you still in touch with her?’
‘I’m still in touch with her, yes.’
Ali stares at her for a moment then leans back on the bench and looks straight in front of her at a bedroom high in the middle line of the quad, below the sundial. Sophie waits, puzzled by her behaviour, and increasingly apprehensive that this somewhat drunk yet articulate woman is about to hurl an emotional grenade.
‘As to whether she’s well – well, she’s well enough. She’s professionally successful. Unmarried; no children.’
‘What does she do?’ She clutches at straws.
Ali turns and looks at her directly. ‘She’s a barrister.’
And there it is: that frisson of fear, so intense the air around her perceptibly chills and every sensation becomes heightened. Earnest Holly – plump; painfully right-on; almost pretty; rather sweet; somehow unworldly – is a barrister. Kate Woodcroft flashes into her mind and she dismisses the image at once. That’s not even a possibility. And yet Holly became someone as authoritative – as powerful – as her.
‘That was Holly’s bedroom.’ Ali jerks her eyes up. ‘I found her there afterwards. She’d locked the door and it took twenty minutes for me to persuade her to open it. When I did, she wouldn’t let me touch her: arms wrapped tight around herself; swamped in those baggy clothes I’d finally persuaded her not to wear.’ Her voice catches, a moment of weakness, and she steadies it, still not looking at Sophie; eyes straight ahead, as if she is determined to finally have her say.
‘You wonder why she left? What made her give up her Oxford degree when she had fought so hard to get here? What could make a young woman do that?’ She turns and looks at her.
‘I don’t know,’ Sophie grasps for any wild, possible explanation, though her insides are falling away and she feels as if she is tumbling inside herself. She knows what is coming. ‘Did she get pregnant?’
‘She was raped.’
The words are whispered: just three syllables, shots from a gun that reverberate and resonate.
‘Your husband has form, Sophie,’ Ali says. Her voice is low and pragmatic; saddened not malevolent. ‘I am only telling you this because I’m drunk; I had to get drunk to say it. But that doesn’t mean it’s not true. He raped her as an eighteen-year-old virgin at the end of our first year. I don’t imagine he’s ever considered the impact of what he’s done; perhaps he didn’t even realise: thought it was just another casual sexual encounter. But he did it all the same.’
The ugly words swarm around her and she stands, desperate to escape. Her legs feel insubstantial but her heart is racing, blood thudding through her head.
‘Don’t be absurd.’ She knows she sounds preposterous but she has to say something. ‘You don’t know what you’re saying. You’re lying! What a nasty, vicious thing to say.’
Ali looks up at her from the bench; gives a minimal shrug, just the smallest of movements. ‘I’m not – and I’m so sorry.’
‘You little bitch.’ The words take Sophie aback but her self-preservation is stronger than she realised. Whatever the truth, she can’t let people think this of James.
She must get away from this woman; and she turns, head held high, kitten heels clicking fast upon the path as she stalks away. Click, click, click. Keep your posture straight; keep walking away from her; don’t run; you’re nearly there. She tries to cling to something positive. The children! She imagines Finn’s arms tight around her; then sees Emily’s face, just a little doubtful when told Daddy was in court because a lady was unkind. She twists on a heel, falters, stumbles, then half-runs as the truth comes crashing down on her; the facts neatly aligning like a Rubik’s cube clicking into place.
At the library, she starts to slow but Ali’s voice follows her as she leaves the quad; a final taunt – low and mocking – that will hound her in the long hours of a sleepless night and continue to nag her over the coming days and weeks.
She tries to pretend it is never said but the night is still and the quad empty.
‘I’m telling the truth – and I think you know it.’