“Addison Court Student Accommodation” is the first result in her search. It is described as “Bristol’s best new student accommodation for undergraduates.”
Ruth stares at the page on Jayne’s phone. She feels vindicated and horrified.
And Jayne feels as if her world is being turned upside down. Ifthey’re wondering if this is who Toby is, then should they believe that Edie can be a murderer?
Is Mark in danger?
She gets up and goes to stare out of the window, wanting a moment to breathe. To think. She cannot lose Mark. Her life will fall apart.
Where is he? What the hell has Edie done?
She sees another set of headlamps crawl through the fog into the farmyard, and her heart leaps, because it might be Mark, but a moment later it’s obvious that it’s a police car and she thinks, They must be here to tell me that Mark is dead.
In the car, outside Edie’s house, I take a moment. I need to collect my feelings. If I’m honest, I’m exhausted.
Being in Edie’s house wasn’t easy. She was and always will be the love of my life.
My most precious memory of her is a night, long ago, which we spent by the beach.
Eighteen years ago, the gang stayed at a cottage near the coast in Wales owned by a friend of Toby’s family. It was our first weekend away together. We were lent the cottage because we couldn’t afford to rent anywhere. Nobody had any money back then.
Rob and Edie had only recently got together. I don’t think I was the only one to be surprised. All of us men had been vying for her, in our way, and she’d flirted back with each of us. If you were feeling uncharitable, you could say she’d strung us along. And then, one day, out of the blue, she announced that Rob was the one for her. It was a shock, to say the least.
Their relationship changed us all. We all had to work hard to get used to it, which was more difficult for some of us than others.By the time we went to the cottage for the weekend, Edie and Rob had been a couple for a little over a year.
I say cottage, but actually it was a very basic place, practically a hovel, but it was magical because it was only a stone’s throw from the sea.
It was our final evening. We’d spent three blissful days and two nights there, Edie was asleep on a daybed, partly covered by a gauzy scarf she’d worn across her shoulders earlier. Beneath it I could see her silky dress and the way it draped over her body drove me crazy. I stood close and my parched eyes drank in the sight of her.
I’d been in love with her since the first day we met in school.
The others were on the beach. I’d watched them step down from the rickety terrace together and make their way toward the ocean. Moonlight silvered the fine sand and whitened the surf. They settled beside the rocks, huddled lazy and relaxed around a fire.
On the coffee table in front of Edie, a green marble ashtray containing three discarded cigarette butts, each pink with her lipstick. I picked one up and pocketed it.
I loved to see Edie smoke. It intoxicated me. I thought of her as a diva, not a modern diva but an old-fashioned Hollywood type. She would look fantastic in a black-and-white movie.
I feasted my eyes on her as she lay there. I stood so long in the half dark that eventually, touching her didn’t seem wrong at all, but natural.
The back of her knee was pale, almost glowing. I ran my fingertips down her thigh toward that soft hollow of skin. She was a work of art, every bit of her.
She stirred, her thighs moved, one over the other and I sank my hand between them. She didn’t repel me when she opened her eyes and saw me, there was no shock in her expression, and, encouraged, I knelt beside her, and my heart skipped a beat as I felt her thighs tighten. She held my face, and I did the same to her. It was beautiful.
She told me she’d been fitted with a coil, and we made love and the whole time our bodies moved together I could hear our friends on the beach, distant and so other. I laughed out loud as I came. I felt ecstatic. Her fingers pushed hard against my bitten lips. She shook her head and whispered, “Shh. This has to stay our secret.”
My greedy eyes watched as she walked toward the bathroom. I thought of her cleaning herself up in there, wiping me from her. The intimacy was almost overwhelming. Years of wanting something and here it was, and it didn’t disappoint.
When she reemerged I opened my arms to her; just a few moments more was all I wanted but she walked past me, not even breaking her stride as she grabbed her scarf from the floor and draped it around her shoulders.
I hastily did up my shorts and followed her as far as the deck. She broke my heart as she strode down the beach toward the others and didn’t look back and I felt cold all over in spite of the warm evening. She settled down beside Rob. I knew it was him. I recognized his silhouette. He put his arm around her, and she leaned into him.
I was hurting as I stood on the deck watching. I had just felt as if I had been brought alive, had just had one of the most incredible experiences of my life, but to her, it was nothing. When that sank in, an involuntary shudder shook me from top to bottom and my thoughts became dark, slithering like hagfish. It was the first time I wished that Rob was dead.
I quelled the thought immediately, of course. It shocked and appalled me, and I recognized that it was heinous. I resolved to put it away for good and to live my own life. I would stay close to Edie and that would be enough.
And for a long time I was successful. I got on with living. When Edie’s pregnancy began to show, I didn’t connect it to me. I wasyoung, busy, and, in retrospect, stupid. The timings were suggestive but nothing in Edie’s behavior led me to suspect that I might be the father. And when Imogen was first born everybody said how much she looked like Rob. I agreed. It wasn’t until she grew bigger, and her baby features receded that her resemblance to Edie took over and any sign of Rob was obliterated as she bloomed into a clone of her mother.
It was only this year, back in spring, when I learned that Rob was infertile that I began to join up the dots. Edie used me, I thought, to make a child. She hadn’t been fitted with a coil. That was a lie because her husband was infertile, and they didn’t want to admit it.
