“At a mutual friend’s party. It’s a cliché, but I literally couldn’t take my eyes off her. I worked up the courage all evening to go and speak to her. Drank way too much beforehand, which was par for the course for me back then. We had this instant connection, you know? We spent the rest of the night together. I was a bit worried I was coming on too strong—I tend to become a bit consumed by relationships—but she didn’t seem to mind. She was—she became—everything to me.”
My nails are now digging into my palm so hard I’m sure I’m going to break the skin. But still, he plows on.
“We spent every day together after that. It was one of those whirlwinds where we just couldn’t get enough of each other. She really helped me get it together. I was heading down a bad path, which is what happens when you get shipped off to boarding school aged eight. Your peers are your parents. And when your peers are experimenting…it normalizes a lot of behavior that’s just not acceptable. I’m pretty sure most of the teachers knew about it and turned a blind eye.” He takes a breath. “But yeah. Alice was like a guardian angel, I suppose. She helped me turn everything around. Helped me get sober. She saw me at my worst and loved me anyway.”
Call me naive, but I hadn’t given much thought to the dead wife up until now. If anything, I was grateful to her for dying when she did, bringing me and Jack together at the group. Letting some light back into my life. But now? Envy blooms in the pit of my stomach.
“Well, she sounds like quite the saint.” I’m not sure where it comes from, but it leaves my mouth with searing venom. Usually, my armor is pristine, but this small crevice of darkness causes Jack’s face to drop, then harden.
“I just mean”—I huff a laugh, but it sounds strained—“that she sounds like a really lovely person.” I can’t get the tone right. It sounds too high.
Jack’s eyes have narrowed. I scramble for something to say, but my words sit heavy between us. The mood sours so suddenly, I don’t have another chance to pull him back in.
It is a singularly British thing to struggle through something that no longer holds value, and that is exactly what Jack and I do. Conversation is painful. I try my best to generate more and more and more questions, but they feel forced. He doesn’t ignore me. It’s worse than that. He gives short, sharp answers that leave the silence blooming once more. Whenthe waiter asks if we want pudding, he says no quickly and reaches for his wallet.
I’ve lost control of the situation. It doesn’t happen very often, and I’m not quite sure how to deal with it. How to claw this back. And so I do something reckless. I lean forward and grasp for Jack’s hand with the sort of thoughtless desperation Marcie would have laughed at. It doesn’t work. He jerks his hand away, looking at me with so much disdain I shrink back into my chair.
“I think you’ve misread this, Iris.” There’s none of the playful, flirtatious tone now. “I’m just not in the right place at the moment. I’ll see you later.”
He stands, shrugs into his jacket, and without a single glance back, leaves me sitting by myself at the table.
Sixteen
The upside toMarcie’s ever-changing facades was that she was almost too busy to notice me at school anymore. At fourteen, we were both navigating the ups and downs of puberty, though she had somehow managed to avoid the plague of acne that peppered my cheeks and chin. She was barely at home at the weekends, juggling numerous dates with numerous suitors. She attended every party she was invited to, and when she was not necking some boy down a dodgy alley behind the chicken shop, she had plans to meet up with Jessica or Olivia or Helena. She wore heavy eye makeup that made her more intimidating than she already was. She took up smoking—a vile habit that would probably have killed her eventually, had she even made it past seventeen.
But without her contempt, school became a more pleasant place for me. One lunch break, she forgot herself to such an extent that she smiled at me.
The thawing of our relations did not go unnoticed. Marcie liked to be looked at, and people liked looking at her. They noticed every tiny change in her appearance; every phrase she used was picked up and disseminated among our peers, every mannerism mimicked and honedto perfection. It was sometimes like being surrounded by a legion of Marcies. So when she softened toward me, everyone else did, too.
A couple of years after we’d started at St. John’s, I found a small group of acquaintances who were by no means popular but whom I got along with just fine. It was a mutually beneficial relationship: They knew who I was and whom I was related to, and I helped to raise their social standing that way. In turn, they made my days at school that little bit less lonely. I no longer dreaded walking the hallways. I had people to sit with at lunch. Despite this, I got the distinct impression they were never completely sure of me. They even seemed wary at times: They couldn’t understand why I nipped to the bathroom after every lesson to wash my hands, nor why I produced my own sanitized Tupperware at lunch, filled with food I’d prepared myself.
I’d tell you their names, but there doesn’t seem much point. They weren’t around for long enough to matter. I had about six months of contentedness before Dad pulled me aside one evening and asked me a question that would, once again, drive a stake through my and Marcie’s relationship.
With Marcie out so much, I was able to form more of a relationship with my parents. I still caught Mum looking at me sometimes with a small divot between her brows, but Dad seemed keen to forge a new bond. I still refused to go on walks with him, but I allowed him to tell me about his latest discoveries and found I enjoyed recalling my long-dormant knowledge of nature.
In the autumn term, we’d spend dark evenings discussing his findings, the encyclopedia—in use once more—open between us. It was on one of these evenings that Dad cleared his throat, darted a glance toward the ceiling, where Mum was having a bath, and lowered his voice.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you about Marcie,” he said slowly, stiltedly, as though the next words out of his mouth would be rebellious. His eyes flicked toward the ceiling again. Clearly this was an originalthought, not one sanctioned by Mum. I stiffened. I did not want him to ask whatever was coming next, but he plunged on regardless, oblivious to my anxiety.
I stared at an illustration of a stag beetle as he said, “Do you think she’s been going out too often? I’m a bit concerned she’s”—he cleared his throat again—“getting a bit of a reputation for herself.”
This was the sort of question that always made me uncomfortable. Because, in truth, I had heard rumors at school. You’d call it slut shaming now. Back then, it was the norm, when a girl’s value was measured by her ability to hold out—not so much that it made her a prude, but just enough so as not to seem “easy.” The rumors were the sort of salacious gossip that always surrounds someone like Marcie. Ill-advised attempts to topple her reign. She didn’t care, not then. Not yet, anyway. She told me, privately, that the furthest she’d “gone” was second base in a cupboard at Helena’s party, but I saw it differently. The rumors marked a sea change. A suggestion that some of the allure of her was wearing off. Too much of a good thing, and all that. There were whispers about her losing her virginity, particularly transgressive within the parameters of a Catholic school.
I didn’t know how to respond, so I remained silent for a good minute, wondering if I could get away with not answering at all. Dad leaned forward, placed his hand on my forearm. “You can tell me,” he said softly. “I know she hasn’t always made things easy for you. I just want to know.”
I stared at him, taken aback. I hadn’t realized that Dad was aware of the choke hold Marcie had on my life. I wondered, first, why he hadn’t said something before. Why he had stood by as Marcie stamped herself all over my existence. And it was with this sense of injustice still thrumming through me that I began to talk. I told him what people had been saying about her, that she lied to them frequently about where she was going, that she smoked and—I suspected—took drugs, too. With each sentence, the words seemed to gain momentum, until they took on alife of their own, tripping over one another in their haste to be spoken. I felt powerful and purged in that moment: like I was regaining some fundamental part of myself that I’d lost all those years ago.
But the words stopped flowing when I looked up and caught sight of Dad’s expression. It was one of abject horror, and I knew I’d gone too far. My stomach lurched painfully, and I wanted to claw everything back, but what I’d said sat between us like a bomb.
Dad blinked once, twice, three times in quick succession. He seemed lost for words. He cleared his throat again.
“Dad,” I said, and there was a desperate edge to my tone. “Please.”
“I can’t not do anything with this information, Iris. Surely you understand that. I won’t say it was you who told me, I promise.”
This was not a comforting assertion. She would know. She always knew. I’d gone into so much detail that it could only have come from me. Dad rose from his seat, the encyclopedia forgotten. I grabbed for his arm, but he shook me off and left the room.
I sat, frozen, and listened to him mount the stairs. I heard the knock on the door to the bathroom. I heard the low rumble of voices, before Mum’s became shrill. The door to the bathroom banged open.
