The Woman He Loved Before Read online

  ‘OK,’ I said, my heart feeling as if it had been twisted in barbed wire, caught and stuck, pierced in several places. Please don’t let this be the start of what I think it could be, I thought as I left the room. Please don’t let this be the start of Eve coming between us.

  jack

  I have this recurring dream that I walk into my bedroom and Eve is sitting on the bed, wearing her pink wedding dress, her knees pulled up to her chest, arms wrapped around her legs, and her hair falling like waves over her arms as she rests her head on her knees. Her sobbing fills the room and the room seems to shake in sympathy with her distress.

  ‘God, Eve, what’s wrong?’ I ask, unable to get too close to the bed because her sorrow is like a wall around her. I want to reach out to her, but she will not be consoled.

  ‘Oh, Jack,’ she sobs in reply. ‘How could you? How could you fall in love with someone else? How could you marry her? Don’t you even care that I’m not here any more? Don’t you love me?’

  Originally, my eyes would fly open at that point and I’d be almost sick with guilt, my heart galloping in my chest. Libby would be cradled in my arms and I’d have to untangle myself, gently easing our bodies apart so as to not wake her, then I would roll away, to the other side of the bed, face away from Libby while I tried to blot out the sound of Eve crying in my head.

  Over time, the dream progressed. It slowly became more and more detailed, intricate, damning. I wouldn’t wake up at her accusation, I would instead be standing in front of her, pleading with her to understand.

  ‘Of course I care that you’re not here any more. Of course I love you.’

  ‘So, why did you have to fall in love with her? Sex doesn’t mean anything, love means everything.’ And her sobbing would escalate, filling every part of me with a searing, twisting pain.

  ‘Eve, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I don’t love her,’ I’d say. My mouth running away with me, desperate as I was to make her stop crying. ‘Eve, Eve! Eve, no! I made a mistake, I should never have married her. I don’t love her.’

  It would work, Eve would stop crying and her red, swollen face would finally lift from her knees and she would look beyond me to the doorway. ‘See? I told you,’ she’d say.

  I’d turn and find Libby standing there, watching me. She’d look at me with understanding and a sadness that was heart-piercing in its hopelessness before she turned and began to walk away.

  I’ve been having this dream again since the accident. Libby dreams about the crash, I dream about this. Like her, I wake bathed in sweat, shaking, harried. Unlike her, I also wake up with another piece of my soul sliced away. Now, I’m apparently calling out to Eve.

  I wish I could explain to Libby what Eve’s death did to me, how it’s there almost everyday. But I can’t vocalise it without telling her everything. And ‘everything’ is not something I can talk about.

  But not telling her is taking its toll on her.

  She’s so very fragile now. The changes not visible to the eye are the things that knot me up inside: Libby is fretful, jumpy, uncertain. I watch her, and I can see nothing but confusion in her eyes, in her actions. Sometimes it’s as if she doesn’t even remember how to do everyday things like put water into the kettle or open a tin of dog food because she is not sure she is doing it properly.

  The ache I feel when I watch her trying to be normal when she is only just holding herself together is like nothing I have ever felt before. When Eve died, it was easy to let myself go and grieve, I did not have to keep what I was feeling in check because it would hurt her: Eve didn’t know. With Libby, after the dream has dragged me into the real world, I lie awake, staring at the ceiling, recounting all the ways I’ve let her down.

  Before the wedding, we moved into her little flat in Brighton because the house was being redecorated. Buying new bedroom furniture had turned into a desire to make the place ours. I suggested a new colour for the walls and new carpet and she had asked me if I was sure. I wasn’t – it was like painting over the time I had spent there with Eve – but I had to push forwards, to make my life with and about Libby. She’d wanted us to paint it ourselves, but the enormity of the task especially when we were planning a wedding meant she had to let me get decorators in.

  Meanwhile, we bedded down in her flat, small and cosy with nowhere to run to if we felt like we were getting on top of each other. It was perfectly claustrophobic; a confined time I had never spent with anyone I loved before. I watched her sleep, I watched her pad to the tiny bathroom next to her bedroom, her pyjamas creased, her hair tied up in a scarf, rubbing her eyes and murmuring curse words at the time of day. I lay in bed and through the wide-open door noted with loving care her mannerisms as she spooned porridge with tinned milk into her mouth while standing over the sink in the kitchenette at the end of the living room. I grinned every time she called to me to enjoy my lie-in because staying at her flat meant my walk to work was only fifteen minutes away. I loved the way she flopped onto the sofa when she came home from work, the way she’d smile at me if I said I’d make dinner, the way she would try to stay awake past ten o’clock but would always end up drooling on my shoulder and protest when I forced her to bed. ‘Stop watching me,’ she’d say all the time, a little smile on her face because she was watching me too.

  ‘I can’t help it,’ I’d reply, ‘I’m fascinated by you, in love with you.’

  ‘Well, go be fascinated and in love with the TV. I’m trying to sort out this spot, it’s not easy with you watching.’

  A week before the wedding, while I was wide awake and watching her, she reached up and stroked my cheek with her eyes closed and I kissed her mouth, and for some reason it was going to be then. We hadn’t even come close to it since that night, but it was now because I was undressing her, she was running her hands over my body, making small sounds of pleasure at the back of her throat. Just before I pushed into her, I heard her murmur something. I wasn’t meant to hear – it didn’t even sound as though she was aware she had said it; it was a thought in her heart that had accidentally tumbled out of her lips.

  We fell asleep curled up like we usually did, but what she said stayed with me.

  ‘Please don’t break my heart, Jack,’ she’d whispered.

  I won’t, I silently replied. I couldn’t.

  I have.

  I should tell her, put her out of her misery and confusion, allow us both to move on from where we are in a more honest place. The good times we have together are wonderful, and the bad times are usually brought about by me trying to spare her feelings by keeping quiet about Eve.

  I’m not sure she would mind, but I am scared to take that chance, terrified of her hating me properly. If she never remembers what I did after the crash, then I’ll never have to see another woman I love look at me with hate in her eyes.

  libby

  As usual, Jack is on the other side of the bed when I wake up again, sweaty and shaking from my nightmare about the crash, but unlike usual he is reaching out for me, his arm outstretched, as though he couldn’t help moving away, but he’s doing all he can to stay as close to me as possible. I close my eyes and try to force myself back to sleep. Maybe the crash has had a good effect on us, maybe now that we know what we have to lose we’re going to be more open with each other. Maybe – hopefully – this is the start of the rest of our lives together.

  libby

  ‘Butch, there’s nothing down there for you. I promise.’ He’s at the cellar door, scrabbling away, damaging the paintwork. I probably should get upset by that sort of thing – Jack would normally – but I really don’t care. There are bigger, better things to worry about, I suppose.

  This dog, a Yorkshire Cross, apparently, has been with us five days and when he isn’t lounging in his bed in the hall, he is desperately trying to get into the cellar. Anyone would think he’d buried a bone down there for safe keeping and wants it back.

  Butch stops scrabbling at the door, turns then sits down and looks at me. He’s fed up.


  ‘I’ve told you, no,’ I reply to him.

  He barks.

  The doorbell interrupts this moment of conflict and I think for a moment of ignoring it. Pretending I’m not in and letting the person go away. But it won’t be a cold caller, someone I can legitimately ignore, it’ll be someone I know who will ring my mobile and ring the house. If I don’t answer, they’ll ring Jack, and he’ll come charging home to rescue me, even though it’s his first week back in the office after the accident. That’s if the ambulance, police and fire brigade haven’t already been told to break in.

  ‘This isn’t over,’ I tell Butch as I move towards the door.

  ‘Ding-dong, Grace Clementis calling.’ She is glowing; the very picture of a woman who takes her beauty seriously. She is holding up her Louis Vuitton case, in which she keeps her manicure set. Before the accident, Grace had been using me as a cheap beauty school because it is one of her passions.

  ‘It’s like God answered my prayers in more ways than one,’ she said when I met her again, this time as Jack’s girlfriend. ‘Jack gets together with someone lovely and she’s a beautician. I must have been so good in a former life.’

  I stare at her, wondering if she really wants a lesson right now. I can barely walk, can barely hold a thought in my head – giving her a beauty lesson isn’t necessarily the last thing I want to do, but it’s pretty far down that list.

  ‘I’m thinking your nails have probably been neglected these last two weeks. So what you need is someone to give you a professional manicure. And ta-da,’ she twirls, ‘here is one such professional.’ In her real life, she is head of a marketing department of a major bank.

  I say nothing. What is there to say that won’t be rude and hurt her feelings?

  ‘Thing is, lovey, I’m not leaving until I get to paint your nails, so we can do this hard way or we can do it the harder way.’

  She smiles as I step aside to let her in. Butch is in his basket in the corridor and raises his head to look at her. He gives her a welcome bark. She smiles and says, ‘Hello, boy, aren’t you a cutie?’

  He barks her a happy reply, then looks disparagingly at me before contentedly laying his head down on his paws and closing his eyes to go to sleep. I marvel once again, as I often do, at how Grace can charm virtually anyone.

  ‘What was Jack like after Eve died?’ I ask Grace.

  We’re sitting at the kitchen table, Grace’s tools spread in front of us, a rainbow of nail colours to my right. She’s been working in silence, concentrating as she’s massaged my hands – the left one still slightly tender from the accident – with luxurious hand cream, then used nail varnish remover to prep my nails for the basecoat.

  The basecoat brush in her hand halts its progress from the base to the tip of the nailbed on the forefinger of my left hand, and her lowered head dips a fraction more.

  She hesitates then gathers some composure before she starts to paint again. I’ve never asked her about Eve before, I’ve never felt the need. But Jack calling out to her in his sleep is starting to get to me. Mingled with the things the policewoman told me and I’m starting to feel very down. I thought I was moving forwards, getting better, but I seem stuck, unable to shake the feeling that Jack is keeping something from me. He’s not himself and I want to know if this is how he responds to trauma or if there is something else eating away at him.

  ‘What do you mean?’ she asks.

  ‘I mean, what was he like, how did he react? He’s told me he didn’t behave very well, but what does that mean exactly?’

  She halts the brush again. ‘It means he became a different person.’

  She raises her head, the blanket of honey-blonde hair she had twisted around the base of her neck to keep out of the way of my nails falls gently back into place by her face and shoulders. I envy her hair. Not just that, I envy her the ability to hide behind her hair if she so chooses. And even more so, I envy her for looking like a woman. ‘He was almost finished by Eve’s death. It was like he’d been ripped apart and it was only his skin keeping him together. He was permanently angry, he would rage and lash out at everyone – I really don’t know how he kept his job. He drank non-stop. I tried to reach him – we all did – but nothing we did would sink in.’

  ‘So, what happened to make him stop?’

  She stares into space for a moment. ‘I’m not very proud of this, so … Well, basically, about six months after she died, he went on an all-day bender then drove to our house. Rupert went through the roof. I’ve never seen him so angry, because Jack had not only put his life at risk but the lives of every person on the street. He was scared, too, that Jack would destroy himself, but at that time he was so furious he refused to let Jack stay with us. Rupert bundled Jack into the back of our car and then dropped him off here. I said I’d stay to make sure he was all right; Rupert couldn’t because he was still too angry.

  ‘As far as I was concerned, that was it. Jack was going to kill himself and I was going to lose another friend. When Jack woke up and found me in tears he thought I was crying about Eve and started trying to comfort me. I told him I was crying because it felt like he had died too and that, the way he was carrying on, it was only a matter of time.

  ‘And to that, he said, really nastily, that he didn’t see the point in living any more. At that moment, I stopped being scared and became incredibly angry. Here was I – and everyone who knew him – trying to help him and he’d all but decided to do away with himself. None of us mattered, just Eve. I told him he was a selfish bastard and left. He turned up later that day to collect his car and to apologise, but I wouldn’t even let him in the house. I stood at an upstairs window and threw his car keys at him and told him to … to fuck off out of my life so it wouldn’t hurt so much when he finally did kill himself.

  ‘He was really shocked because that was the first time I’d ever turned on him. He admitted that he’d been selfish, and I said he was all talk and I had to see real change before I became his friend again.’

  ‘Did you mean that?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she admits. ‘I wanted to. I wanted to shock him out of the state he was in, but I don’t know how long Rupert and I could have kept it up. He made the choice, thankfully, to stop the drinking and the rage.’ She shakes the bottle of basecoat vigorously between her thumb and forefinger. ‘I think he realised he’d hit rock bottom because we were threatening to cut him off. If he’d chosen to carry on, God knows what would have happened.’ She shudders and grimaces at the thought. ‘He didn’t change overnight, you understand, or even become a better person, he simply stopped doing dangerous things. He behaved badly in other ways until you put him in his place. But that, I could handle.

  ‘I’m just glad he stopped before he’d killed or maimed someone in his—’

  Grace’s cheeks almost explode with scarlet. She uncaps the bottle, dips her head, this time not moving her hair aside but instead using it as a veil to hide her face while she goes back to the manicure. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says.

  ‘It’s OK,’ I reply, and it is. The accident wasn’t Jack’s fault, despite what thoughts and doubts that policewoman had tried to plant in my head.

  ‘Did you ever meet Detective Sergeant Morgan?’ I ask Grace.

  ‘Her! That … I hate to speak ill of the law, but she … She tried to get all sorts of information about Jack out of me. Trying to find out if he was violent, if he could have killed Eve. I soon put her straight. Even if he was violent, she went about it in such a ham-fisted way that if there was anything to tell – which there wasn’t – I would have kept it to myself.’ Grace pauses in painting and looks up at me. ‘Hang on, how do you know about her?’

  ‘She came to take my statement about the crash, but what she was really doing was trying to tell me that Jack murdered Eve and I was probably next on the list.’

  ‘I hope you told her where to go,’ Grace says, more outrage in her voice than shows on her face. There’s something in the way she drops eye contact while
shaking her head at the audacity of the policewoman that unsettles me for a minute or two.

  ‘Of course,’ I reply, watching her not look at me.

  ‘She’s got some nerve, I’ll give her that.’

  I can tell the conversation is over from the way Grace slips into silence as she works on my nails. Every stroke she paints onto my nails smoothes on a temporary coolness that shivers a pleasant thrill through me. I watch the brush, flattening out as it moves, covering and protecting my nails from the colour that is to come. I suppose it must be awful to think of your friend being painted as a killer: it’s obviously not something she wants to talk about. I don’t want to, either, I’m more interested in Jack and the effect Eve had on him.

  ‘What were Jack’s relationships like before Eve?’ I eventually ask.

  ‘Before Eve? There was no before Eve, I thought you knew that.’ Grace is ready to move onto my right hand but pauses as she reaches for it over the table and stares at me. I return her gaze blankly. ‘You didn’t know?’

  ‘Know what?’ I ask.

  She keeps her hand covering mine, as if she is about to deliver some terrible news. ‘Jack was a virgin when he got together with Eve.’

  ‘I want to fuck you. Can I fuck you?’ Jack says in my head. That memory often unspools in my mind: the carefully modulated demand in his voice; the way it mingled with his body pressing close to mine; the manner in which he phrased it to make sure he had full consent; his impeccable timing so I had already orgasmed and was more likely to comply … those were the actions of an expert. Not a—

  ‘You seriously didn’t know? I’m not being funny, but what do you and Jack talk about?’

  ‘All the wrong things, apparently. He was really a virgin before Eve?’