Cosima will never tell them what she did. She makes a pact with herself: in order to keep her own crimes secret, she has to forgive her father his.
‘We failed you,’ her dad continues, looking at Serena. ‘We understand that now, don’t we?’
Serena nods.
‘Don’t laugh, Cozzie,’ her mother says, ‘but we’ve been having spiritual coaching.’
‘What?!’
‘Can you believe it?’ Ben asks, shaking his head. ‘She’s got me seeing her bloody shaman.’
Cosima laughs then. She can’t help it. Soon they’re all laughing.
‘That’s mad,’ she says. ‘Mad.’
There is something to be salvaged in this moment. It feels nice, talking and laughing with her parents across the time zones, a cool beer by her side, the beauty therapists’ gentle chatter rising from the yard below, the rhythmic crashing of waves in the background.
Cosima doesn’t know yet what the future holds or what forgiveness might look like. But for now, she is tired of fighting. For now, she will concentrate only on this phone call, on picking each word with care, as if collecting ring pulls and bottle caps from the sand to make it clean again.
Cosima watches the screen dim as the English afternoon clouds over. Then her mother gets up to switch on the Tipworth kitchen lights. The room brightens.
‘That’s better,’ her father says. ‘Now I can see you properly.’
XXI.
Martin
STRANGE TO ADMIT BUT WITH OLD SCORES SETTLED,I find my days are empty. There’s nothing that excites me. No interruptions to the regular stultification of lectures and notes and essays and television and sleep and lectures and notes and essays and television and sleep. The perpetual cycle of the mundane. Term has finished and I’m stuck teaching bored, rich summer-school students from America.
‘Is this where Shakespeare was born, Mr Gilmour?’ they’ll ask, in their sing-song Texan drawls while I try to teach them the rudiments of Impressionism. ‘Have you ever met Princess Kate?’
Sometimes I lie and say yes to both, just to interrupt the monotony.
My sessions with Joanne Buster have come to an end, so I don’t even have the enjoyment of feeling infuriated by her anymore. Cosima has left and the cottage is empty without her. In her absence, the press interest has waned. No more bawdy shouting from those wretched photographers gathered on the pavement in their large leather jackets and knitted hats.
‘Oi, Martin, gizza smile!’
They must have taken thousands of photos and yet I only appeared in one. It was taken on the day of Cosima’s departure. She was leaving to get into her taxi, head bowed, shielding her face with her hand and I was the indistinct out-of-focus figure helping her with her case in the early-morning gloom. The caption called me ‘Fitzmaurice family friend, Martin Gilmore’.
Oh, the irony! For so long I’d wanted to be recognised in this way – in print, by others, as part of the historical Fitzmaurice record – and now I had made it with my name misspelled and my physical self forever in the shadows.
I suppose I hadn’t quite realised how much of my life I had carved around the central plinth of my resentment. Stupid to admit, but there we are. I hadn’t understood how much I needed Ben (and then, when we ceased to be friends, the idea of Ben) to focus on. I’ve finally got what I wanted – or, at least, a version of what I wanted – and I don’t know what to do with myself.
It’s a funny thing, revenge. It winds its way around you, muscular as a rattlesnake, and squeezes until you gasp for air. The only way to breathe is to wrestle yourself out of its tightening grip and kill it. A university colleague of mine once told me a story about his sister, who had been living in Australia shortly after the birth of her son. She used to leave her baby in a Moses basket on the floor of her kitchen until, one morning, when she was still in her nightgown and putting the kettle on for tea while her baby slept, she heard a hissing sound. When she turned, she saw a black snake slithering across the linoleum with alarming speed towards her baby. She grabbed a carving knife and beheaded it before the kettle boiled.
‘She didn’t think twice,’ my colleague said. ‘Some maternal instinct just took over.’
The floor was splattered with snake blood, he told me. So she lifted her baby out of his basket and held him close to her, then watched in a state of incredulity as the headless snake continued to move.
‘They retain their reflexes after death, you see,’ he said. ‘They can still bite for hours after they die.’
I think of this dying snake now, of the way it would continue trying to poison even in the absence of its prey, not knowing that the game was over, that its brain was no longer sending signals to its body but was guided instead by some primitive natural impulse over which it had no control. My revenge against Ben had been the snake. I had thought that beheading it would give me peace or satisfaction, a sensethat my life could now start being lived on its own terms, rather than in the shadow of unsettled scores and betrayal. But still my serpentine vengeance tries to hiss and lash out, despite there being nothing to sink its venom into. I am left without purpose, lost in this newness. There’s a fatal flaw in revenge, I realise, which is that the pursuit of it brings you closer to your nemesis than you will ever be again. You have to study their every intricacy, to know the twists and turns of their character better than you know yourself. You have to remember the particular inflection of voice, the specific shading of their behaviour, the teleological narrative of their past history, all while anticipating their next move. I suppose, in the end, revenge is a lot like love. And when love vanishes, one grieves for it.
I admit it. I miss him. I miss Ben.
Richard Take is our new prime minister, which is not a sentence I ever thought I’d write. I suppose his bad decisions will be the result of incompetence rather than malicious superiority, so that’s some small comfort. He hasn’t been in touch, which is wise, but I know that he knows that I know he owes me. It could be very helpful in future, to have the ear of the PM. I’ve got my eye on a consulting role of some sort. Cultural advisor has a nice ring to it.
Cosima emails me updates from Bali. She barely uses punctuation or capital letters but I’m grateful for her communication nonetheless. She sounds busy, which is good. It’s important to keep her mind off things. I’ve told her she’s always welcome here when she decides to come back.
