‘You can let yourself out.’
She listened to the jangle of keys and to the sound of him putting on his coat and then, finally, to the relief-inducing sibilance of the door sliding shut behind him as he left.
She had plugged her phone in to charge and then she had called Ben from Jarvis’s flat, the words tumbling out of her in a savage flurry. He told her to breathe, to stay calm, not to worry, they’d sort it out. He sent a car to pick her up and bring her to Tipworth. But the thing that struck her the most, the thing that she would keep thinking about over the following weeks and months, was that he didn’t sound surprised.
Her brother was waiting for her in the driveway in front of the house. He drew her close and hugged her. She felt grateful for this and worried she smelled. He took her inside and made her a cup of coffee in the kitchen. The housekeeper was fussing around, trying to offer biscuits, and Ben told her to leave them alone and close the door after herself. He asked Fliss to tell him again what had happened, just so he could get it ‘clear in my mind’. She managed to get the words out. By the end she was sobbing.
‘He raped me, Ben,’ she said, allowing the coffee mug to cool in her hands. It was the first time she had used the word.
Ben didn’t reply. The pause was everything Fliss had been fearing. She knew then that he didn’t believe her.
‘I’m so sorry, Fliss,’ he said, putting his hand on her knee. ‘But you’ll forgive me if I sound a note of … caution.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You said you’d been drinking. You’d taken drugs.’
‘Only weed.’
‘So you were pretty out of it, yes?’
She shook her head. The tears clung to her cheeks.
‘Can you really be sure of what you remember?’ Ben continued. ‘And, I don’t know how to put this, Fliss, but you don’t exactly have an unblemished sexual history when it comes to my friends.’
She thought she might throw up again. She couldn’t bear hearing him say it. It was the worst thing he could wound her with and she also knew it was true.
How can one thing be true and another, seemingly contradictory thing be equally so?
It just can.
‘But Ben …’ She put her mug down on the table, more forcefully than she’d intended. Coffee spilled over the rim. ‘I promise you … I’m telling you what actually happened. What he did to me. You have to believe me.’
He looked at her sadly. Then he got up to retrieve a cloth from the sink and wiped away the spilled coffee.
‘I can’t, Fliss,’ he replied. ‘You have a record …’
‘You make me sound like a criminal!’
‘… of making up stories where this kind of thing is concerned. What you said about Grandpa …’
When they were teenagers, she had told her family what their grandfather did to her. He was long dead by then, but their grandmother – still alive, still guarding the precious flame of the Fitzmaurice reputation – had vehemently denied it. Fliss had thought, out of all of them, that Ben had been the one to believe her. She had carried this belief like a talisman. Now, like an axe to the gullet, she understood he never did.
‘You ruined my memories of him and almost ripped our family apart,’ Ben said. ‘And I’m sorry you thought he did that. Truly. I am. I’m sorry you think Jarvis has attacked you. But the truth is, darling Fliss, that your brain is very unwell and you’re not a reliable witness and we need to get you some help. So that’s what we’ll do, OK? You’ll stay here and we’ll look after you until we’ve found somewhere for you to go.’
There were no words left. She would never be able to change his mind. She slunk upstairs to one of the many spare bedrooms and fell asleep without taking off her clothes.
After a week at Tipworth, she had gone to the police. She hadn’t told Ben. She had walked into town one morning on her own. She hadfiled a report, said she wanted to press charges. The male officer had looked at her with patronising kindness and told her she’d left it ‘a bit late for that’. They didn’t have any evidence, did they? She should have come straight to them and had swabs taken. Now it was just her word against his. The unspoken implication was, well of course no one is going to believe a tramp like you over a notable individual like Andrew Jarvis.
‘You staying with your brother at the big house?’ the officer had said as he saw her out. ‘Send him our best, won’t you?’
Fliss remained at Tipworth for a fortnight. Every morning, she would get up early to walk the maze, the twists and turns of the carefully pruned hedges acting as counterpoint to her own internal messiness. She kept retracing the sequence of events over, trying to make sense of the senseless.
Had she led Jarvis on?
Had she deserved it?
What could she have done differently?
