The odd thing is, I actually mean it.
I dreamed of Fliss last night. She was on a beach, beckoning towards me and smiling. She looked – and I can’t think of a less hackneyed word – beatific.
A terrible day.
I came home to silence. Normally Maurice would jump off and rush to the kitchen as soon as he heard my key in the lock, waiting forhis bowl to be filled as if he hadn’t been fed in weeks. But today there was no leaping or rushing. There was no waiting by the bowl, nudging my hand with the top of his head as I tried to open a can of his ocean paté. In the hallway, I called out his name. No response.
It was only when I walked into the sitting room that I saw what had happened. He was lying there, curled up on the sofa in his usual place, his nose tucked under his tail, his paws neatly crossed. He didn’t move when I came in. There was no welcoming purr or quizzical mewing. When I reached out to stroke him, his fur was cold, the small, dear body rigid.
He was a good cat. I never knew his real age. He’d turned up unannounced in my garden one day seven years earlier and that was that. He was my most loyal companion. I was never judged by Maurice.
I buried him in the garden. I took the rusted spade from the shed and dug a spot beneath the acacia. The ground was harder than I thought it would be and it was a mucky business – as I write, my trouser legs are still splattered with mud – but I wanted to give him a dignified final resting place, so I kept at it.
I wrapped Maurice in a yellow hand towel, giving his head one final stroke. Then I laid his body in the hole. He looked so small there and I worried he would be lonely, so I went back inside the house and brought out one of his favourite catnip fish toys. I put the fish next to his front paws. Better. I started filling the grave, spade by spade. Clods of soil landed with a thud. Soon, every scrap of yellow was covered. I patted the earth flat and, kneeling there, was seized with the desire to pray. I muttered the lines of Our Father, for the first time since school, and asked a God I don’t believe in to look after Maurice in the afterlife. Perhaps he’ll find a nice warm radiator he can sleep next to.
The cottage is very quiet tonight.
I think I will go to bed.
I’ve had the television on all day. Most unlike me but I wanted to hear the sound of other voices. The news leads with the charges against Jarvis being dropped. Not enough evidence. Hard to provecases of historic sexual assault. The victim now dead and unable to press charges. Etcetera.
It’s a blow, I can’t deny it. The older I get, the more I think that there is no justice, that Thomas Hobbes was right when he wrote that human life was ‘nasty, brutish and short’. We convince ourselves that we care about something greater than our petty little lives, that we exist in civilised connection with each other, building communities of enlightened compromise and calling them ‘democracies’, but really we’re guided by pure self-interest. Jarvis has money, which means he has power: the more of the former he’s amassed, the more of the latter he’s been granted and the more he’s been able to twist the truth into a lie that serves him.
He scares me. He always has. When he bullied me at school, it was because he saw his own weaknesses mirrored by mine. We were the ones who never fully fitted in, who had no weapons of belonging at our disposal. We needed Ben. But now, in adult life, the axis of power has shifted. It is Jarvis who can manipulate people and bulldoze systems; who can bend the arc of justice itself.
I had hoped other women might come forward but I think they’re all too frightened. He’s covered his traces well. I imagine he picked his victims with care – either the women with nothing to lose, whom no one will believe, or the women with everything to lose who do not want to risk it.
Is there no one who can stand up to him?
I wonder if Jarvis will come after me. I wonder if he knows. He always did possess a reptilian instinct for uncovering secrets.
The cameramen follow Jarvis as he leaves his house in Holland Park. He’s dressed for jogging, in unappealingly baggy shorts and a black sweatshirt with the logo of his hedge fund embroidered in white thread over his right nipple.
‘Anything to say, Mr Jarvis?’ a reporter shouts, off-screen.
‘I feel totally and utterly vindicated,’ Jarvis says, running his fingers through messy hair. ‘This whole case has been a tissue of fabrication from beginning to end. Now get out of the way, lads, I’m off on my run.’
‘And what about your friend, Ben Fitzmaurice?’
I watch as the cameras trail Jarvis’s receding form, running with ungainly slowness down the street. He raises one arm aloft but doesn’t answer.
What the fuck does that mean?
And if I never see Ben again, who am I without him?
I contemplate my future. It stretches out, long and dull and undistinguished. Lectures and notes and marking. Tepid instant coffee in stained cups in the staffroom, mystified by colleagues who find their own conversation interesting and their jokes amusing. An endless parade of disappointing students. My cottage, an empty refuge. No Maurice or Cosima now. No Tipworth to go to. No campaign to be part of. No more press cuttings to gather about Ben Fitzmaurice’s luminous career. No sense to any of it.
A muffled drumbeat of a question: does he ever think of me?
Serena calls to invite me to dinner four days from now. I am sick with gratitude.
Firstly, this means they do not suspect me – but, of course, how could they? There is no trace back to me.
Secondly, I will see him again. I have something to do with myself. I am going to book my train tickets this instant.
The hydrangeas are in bloom, the garden awash with dusty pink. I cut a stem with secateurs and leave the rosy blossoms on Maurice’s grave, patting the earth gently as I do so.
XXII.
