‘Visiting hours are over now, love,’ the nurse says to Cosima. ‘You can come back tomorrow.’
Cosima shakes her head and is about to say that no, no she can’t leave yet, not now, but the words don’t form and instead she finds herself standing and slipping her arms back through her backpack straps. She watches as River drinks his water. Their eyes meet.
‘You can’t come back,’ he says.
‘I know.’
‘Thank you,’ he says.
‘What for?’
He smiles. This time, his face doesn’t contract in pain.
‘For being you.’
She will never see him again.
The following week, he is front-page news: unmasked as an undercover police officer who almost died in the line of duty at an Oblivion Oil protest and who is now in a witness protection programme. The papers are calling it ‘a national scandal’ because of the level of River’s deception. He’s being labelled ‘a lone wolf’ and ‘a rogue agent’. Questions are being raised in Parliament about whether he showed too much sympathy towards the activists and whether this compromised his primary duty to the police.
It turns out his real name is Ben, which would have made Cosima laugh had she not been crying when she read the article.
A few days later, when she is in her dorm at school, sitting on the bed with her laptop, she receives an email from an encrypted address. Subject heading: ‘As discussed’. A PDF document is attached. No message. She knows it’s from River.
X.
Fliss
IT’S NOT TRUE, THE STORYher family is telling about her.
But then her family has never known the truth about who she is. Or was.
It started with her name. From the Latin,felicitatem, meaning happiness and – here’s the kicker – fertility. And yet she was the unhappiest of her parents’ children, even if you count Magnus who died, aged four, at the beginning of the hot, cloudless summer of 1988. Was Magnus unhappy? Was he even old enough to understand the concept? Before he got meningitis, he’d been a chuckling little thing: golden hair and skin, a buttery smell at the back of his neck. She had loved being his older sister. There were thirteen years between them and she liked to prop him against her hip and teach him things.
‘Now what do you say?’ she’d prompt when a nanny gave him an ice-lolly, mimicking her mother without even realising she was doing it. ‘Good boy,’ Fliss said when he gave a toothy ‘thank you’, and then she’d cuddle him and kiss him on his perfect, perfect cheek. Being with Magnus made Fliss feel capable and loved.
Her own mother dispensed her love from a distance. Fliss knew it was there but it never felt close enough. Her father was more affectionate but he valued strongly held convictions and, generally speaking, Fliss either didn’t know or was too scared to know what her own convictions were. Her father approached her as you would an affectionate but dim pet, almost surprised to see his daughter sitting there around the dining table. ‘Dear Fliss,’ he’d say distractedly and then he’d ask forsomeone to pass the wine and turn his attention back to Ben. Occasionally, her father would pat Fliss on the back or kiss the top of her head. She knew, from the age of four or five, that these moments of interaction must be treasured appropriately. She stored them up, magpie-like, each word or gesture a scrap of shiny tinfoil in her tiny nest. She was desperate, always, for more of his attention, but the desperation put him off. So then Fliss tried the opposite. She tried to become rebellious, angry, inviolable. As a teenager, she had a Goth phase where she dyed her hair black and wore fishnets and ripped denim cut-offs and purple eyeliner. At no point did she grasp that what she thought of as originality was the worst kind of cliché. Her mother, who thought cliché was lower class, despaired of her.
But Fliss loved her brothers and for a long time, she thought this was enough. Although she pretended to find Ben annoying, it was simply a pose of adolescent disdain. She prided herself on the fact that only she could see the real him, the lost soul who existed underneath the surface of his outward dazzle. Ben was insecure: this was the secret no one else knew. He was constantly wanting the good opinion of others, to shore up his own lack of belief. It used to be sweet but, over time, his apprehension hardened and cracked into something more damaging.
When Magnus died, it broke them all in different ways. Fliss’s mother, always remote, became an unreachable satellite, occasionally transmitting signals to their family planet from an implacable distance. Their father never spoke of Magnus’s death and filled the hole left by this awful, yawning sadness with fake bonhomie and bluster. If you didn’t know his history, you would have thought him a cheerful man. Ben, shattered by grief, became determined to control his world and the people in it. It just so happened that he was rewarded for this. Over the years, Fliss watched as her surviving brother became a powerful man. Then the power itself was the thing he needed to protect. It was the thing he loved the most.
And Felicity? Well, she spiralled into cliché again. That was the other thing about her – she never learned from her mistakes. Shejust kept repeating them. Drugs, alcohol, sex. She slept with unavailable men and sometimes women. She came on to Martin, for fuck’s sake, even though he was obviously in love with Ben. Poor Martin. He never did realise they were all laughing at him, with his mooning face and his twitches and tics and his hopeless attempts to fit in. But Fliss liked him. His was the only star, in the grand Fitzmaurice constellation, that shone less brightly than hers.
She had tried, over the years. She really had. She had tried so hard to be different; to escape from herself; to be happy, fertile Felicity. Long periods of sobriety. Stints in expensive rehab, paid for by Ben and Serena, who resented it. She had tried different jobs and different homes and different clothes and different personalities and different countries. Even different names. She rejected Felicity and became Brie or Casey or Jessica or Skylar. But, again and again, the effort proved too exhausting and she would be washed up on the shore, breathless with the impossibility of being anyone other than her stunted self, and then she would look for the thing that would make it better. The next hit, the next high, the next fuck, the next drink. Because ‘The Next’ existed in a slippery, tiptoeing future, full of silvery promise. She kept telling herself that The Next might just be the thing that saved her.
XI.
Martin
MY LAST VISIT TO TIPWORTH PRIORY, the Fitzmaurice country pile, was on the night of Ben’s fortieth birthday party, when it was bedecked and bedazzled with sagging white chandeliers and oversized white vases filled with sickly sweet-scented white flowers.
Today, I’ve been invited for a ‘kitchen supper’ and to stay the night.
‘Nothing special,’ Ben said when he called. To which I silently added, like you, Martin. In any case, it’s too enticing an offer to refuse. I want to see what they’ve done with the place.
It turns out my bedroom is pleasant and overlooks the kitchen garden. There is a particularly fine Arne Jacobsen chair set by the window, although an Hermès blanket has been folded over the arm which feels de trop. Someone – Serena, possibly – has left copies of my books on the bedside table. A nice touch. But everything is a bit too pleased with itself. True elegance shouldn’t have to try this hard.
I take my suit out of the wardrobe and hang it from the four-poster bed. It’s an Anderson & Sheppard, purchased at considerable expense from Savile Row. Serena told me when I arrived that I didn’t need to dress for dinner (‘Just come as you are, darling’) but I know from past experience that the Fitzmaurices don’t do casual and I’m not about to be caught out again. I decide against a tie – too mannered – but instead choose a pocket square in cornflower blue, which works well against the light grey of the jacket. I look at myself in the full-length mirror. I’m satisfied. I think back to the Burtonbury schoolboy I once was, with the wrong shoes and the second-hand uniform, so desperate to fitin and be one of them. Now, I look to the manner born. I close the door behind me and make my way downstairs to the dining room. The table isn’t set. No lights apart from a garish Tracey Emin neon sign hanging on the far wall, the words ‘More Love’ illuminated in bright pink. That would have cost them around £90,000.
