The Woman He Loved Before Read online

  And he laughed so much I started to laugh too. Then he was suddenly in front of me, pulling me into his arms and kissing me. And I was kissing him back and remembering again how much I loved this part of kissing. How incredible and innocent it made me feel.

  I don’t know how long we stood in the kitchen like that, because time seemed to stand still. And then by silent mutual agreement we were holding hands and heading upstairs. I know I wasn’t meant to do that, but it seemed so natural with him. In his bedroom, we stood by the bed kissing again.

  When I reached for his tie, I thought for a moment of all the men’s ties I’d removed in my life, all the men I’d helped to undress, all the men I’d fallen onto a bed with and had tuned out with the second the sex bit started. Then I thought about the kissing, how that made this different. This wasn’t just reaching for the tie of a punter, this was reaching for the tie of Jack Britcham. The man I’d been in love with for months. This was different. This was about him and me, and no one else. I would not let those men in here, I would let no one in here but Jack Britcham and me, and our perfect kisses. As I was letting myself relax into being with him, he stopped my hands and pulled away.

  ‘I’ve never done this before,’ he blurted out.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

  He caressed my hands between his, and looked bewildered and scared. ‘I’ve never,’ he grimaced, then looked pained. ‘I’ve never slept with anyone.’

  ‘Ever?’ I replied.

  ‘I’ve been waiting for the right woman. I know it sounds pathetic, but I … I just wanted it to be right, the first time. Special.’

  The whore and the virgin: how unlikely was that to happen? I should have told him there and then, but I couldn’t. I was not that person when I was with him. ‘Do you want to wait, then? Because we don’t have to do anything. We can just lie together and talk.’

  He kissed my hands. ‘No, I want to. I really want to, if you still do. You might not enjoy it much because I don’t really know what I’m doing … God, this is a conversation I never thought I’d have with someone whose second name I don’t even know.’

  ‘You do know my second name, it’s Eve.’

  ‘Eve?’ he asked, puzzled.

  ‘Yes. I told you, my name is Just Eve.’

  He smiled at me and I felt my soul light up. I wanted to be with him more than anything. For selfish reasons. To be able to express what I felt for him, to be able to break down this barrier I had put around myself whenever I had sex. To be with him and know that it was possible – after all these years of not experiencing anything – to feel something for the person I was having sex with.

  ‘If you want to,’ I said to him, ‘then I want to. It’s that simple.’

  In my mind, when he kissed me again, I shut the door to the men who had gone before. I closed my eyes and relaxed into the kisses of the man I was with.

  It was dangerous, I know, but I let go of myself. I lay with him, I made love to him, I let him make love to me, and I did not resist in my mind, I did not allow the wall to build itself around me, I did nothing but allow myself to experience what being with Jack Britcham was like.

  We held each other for a long time afterwards, not speaking, just being still with each other, occasionally stroking, mainly just being. I could be with Jack Britcham. I could be nothing and everything with him at the same time. I could simply exist.

  I left when he fell asleep, getting dressed in the corridor outside his room so as not to disturb him. I stood at the bedroom door, watching him for a few seconds, sleeping with his head thrown back against the pillow, the sheet up to his middle, his eyes with their long eyelashes resting against his cheeks, his hair messy and sexy, the contours of his face so carefully defined and proportioned. It would take a lot to beat that sort of perfection. I put my lips together and pushed a kiss at him through the air, watching until I imagined it would land lightly on his lips before I turned to leave.

  At the front door, I said goodbye to the house as well. It was so incredibly beautiful, so much a part of Jack Britcham that I felt sad suddenly that I probably would not be able to see either of them again. What I had done was selfish. I should not have slept with him when I knew how important sex was to him. It was important to me, too, but not in the same way. To me, it fed me and allowed me to not be homeless and a pariah in society. To him, it was something he had waited to do because it was more than just a physical act.

  I searched in my pocket for a receipt to write a note on but instead found his business card. A talisman I had slipped into my pocket as good luck this afternoon. I wouldn’t need it any more since I wouldn’t be seeing him again, so I used the pen that had fallen off the telephone table in the hall to write:

  Buying this house is the best thing you’ve ever done. I meant to tell you that earlier. X

  Then I left, and caught a taxi home because it was getting late and I was sure Caesar would be around at some point.

  I didn’t immediately shower because I liked the smell of him on me. He was the only person who I didn’t want to remove from my skin the moment I could. I loved the feel of him, the impressions his body had made on mine. I was hanging onto the thoughts of him, of what we did and how we connected. And my lips, so fantastically bruised, were there for me to touch to remember over and over again.

  It was inconceivable that I could be with anyone else tonight. That’s why I’ve been hiding and not answering the door. No matter what happens tomorrow, I’ve had a moment of perfect happiness and, because of that, I can put up with anything else that comes my way.

  Eve

  February 1997 (just an update)

  I was already pregnant when I slept with Jack.

  I had a little boy or little girl growing inside me while, for the first time since I was fifteen, I understood what they meant when they called sex, ‘making love’.

  I did not know, of course, otherwise I would not have done it.

  Being pregnant was also the reason I left Caesar. Once I found out, discovered that the sickness and the tiredness weren’t simply down to hating almost every second of my life, I realised I couldn’t do it any more. I could not let another man inside my body so that Caesar could get his kicks.

  It was the crossover in Pills, you see. The doctor changed my prescription because I’d been getting debilitating headaches, and I’d been warned to use condoms in the crossover period, but not all of the men would. Unprotected sex, like all the other horrendous, sick things I’d priced myself out of with the hotels and the agency, was something I sometimes had to do. I took a gamble and I had been caught out.

  On a Monday I took the test. I told Caesar on the Wednesday. For two days I had this little secret, something no one else in the entire world knew and it felt so good. It felt like I had been gifted something special. For the first time in my life, I had been given something that was just for me. I didn’t care who the father was, all that mattered was who the mother was and that was me. I had to tell Caesar before Friday because Fridays were often the worst. They would go to one of their clubs and get stoked up on wine and port and spirits and cigars and they would come to the flat expecting service. Sometimes two at once. Sometimes the others would watch. I knew it was a good night when there was only one of them. I couldn’t do any of that with a baby inside me.

  ‘Get rid of it,’ was all Caesar said at first. He didn’t even wait that long to digest the news, he simply said that. Then he reached into the pocket of his discarded jacket for his wallet. From it he pulled out a small white card and a bundle of notes.

  He placed the card and the notes on the table in front of me. I was sitting on the floor by his feet – his favourite position for me – and so could read easily what the card said. ‘These people will do it discreetly and quickly with the minimum of fuss. This is all you’ll need. I expect it to be dealt with by the end of the week.’ Friday. He expected me to get ‘it done’ within two days.

  I don’t know what I expected. I don
’t know if I had been secretly hoping that he would let me keep my baby.

  His answer was clear, though. He did not touch me the entire night, did not undo the button on his trousers which usually meant I was to get up on my knees, unzip him and take him in my mouth. He stayed and talked as if nothing was wrong, nothing had changed, as if on the table in front of me was not the means and information needed to kill the baby inside me.

  At two o’clock, when I was as sure as I could be that he was at home with his wife and would not be coming back that night, I packed up my dress, my diaries, Aunt Mavis’s rosary beads, and my photo in Uncle Henry’s kitbag, and left with the clothes on my back. It was stupid, probably, but I did not take the money – the one thousand pounds – he gave me.

  After that night I did not answer the door to him, he made me get a key cut for him so he could come and go as he pleased. I wanted him to come over and find the money and the card there and to know that I didn’t do as he had ordered.

  So, in September, I left Brighton with little more than I had left London with. I caught a cab to Worthing, and then from a phonebox by the station I finally got the courage to call the number of a women’s refuge that I had memorised.

  They helped me. They found me a safe place to stay, way out in the Kent countryside, and they were nice to me, even when I told them I was a pregnant prostitute hiding from her pimp. They took care of me for a week, made me doctor’s appointments, let me stay inside as much as I could in case someone saw me, and were so incredible to me. And, yet … it wasn’t meant to be. That’s what I tell myself. That’s what I told myself then and that’s what I tell myself now. It wasn’t meant to be.

  I have been through some horrors in my life, but that was probably the worst. I can’t describe it, I can’t relive it. I can only bear it by telling myself it was not meant to be.

  After that loss, I decided I didn’t care if he found me. If he dragged me back to the flat. If he did unspeakable things to me. I moved back to Brighton, I applied for benefits while I applied for any jobs that didn’t need me to explain the holes in my CV, and before my benefits came in I’d found a job cleaning offices in the early mornings and late evenings, and another waitressing in the afternoons. Anytime I wasn’t working, I was reading books I’d got from the library, and telling myself it wasn’t meant to be. I was paid a pittance, so I had no money except to pay my rent, buy food and pay my bills, but it was better than the alternative. When I was cleaning late at night, while the others I worked with were complaining about what filthy pigs we had to pick up after, I would be smiling because I knew I wasn’t going to be penetrated that night by a man I despised. I knew that cleaning a toilet was better than being used as one. I knew that some day I would maybe be lucky enough to experience what I had experienced with Jack Britcham.

  Keeping myself busy, forcing myself to fill the waking hours with work and reading and not much else was a balm on my soul. It slowly helped to bring me back to myself. I was soon strong enough to think about the future, about applying for a college Access course so I could eventually do a degree, and so that I could start to put the woman I was before behind me. Every step forwards I took was another way of dismantling the changeling Eve, who had been an office assistant, then a lap dancer, then a prostitute, and then a sex slave.

  Eve

  libby

  Today Eve is lying on her side, staring into space. She seems so broken and I’m not surprised. She went through all this and she was still someone that Jack loved and Grace liked. She was extraordinary.

  eve

  16th January 1999

  I suppose it was going to happen one day. Brighton isn’t exactly the biggest place in the world. I live in a flat above an off licence right in the centre of Brighton. It is tiny, probably smaller than the place I had in London, but it’s central and I can walk anywhere I like.

  I don’t pay too much in rent because I agreed with the landlady to decorate it for her while I live here. Best of all, it is two minutes from the café so I can be there and back in no time. And it’s not that far to walk to the various offices around Brighton where I clean. I live a very ordered life nowadays and I like it a lot. So what was going to happen one day that happened today?

  Running into Jack, of course.

  I’ve stopped calling him Jack Britcham now because I called him that when I was so enamoured with him, when he was the fantasy man who had handed me his full name on a business card. Now, older and wiser, he’s simply Jack to me. Funny how a change of circumstances can change how you see someone. I have no doubt in my mind at all that back then I was in love with him. The strength of those feelings wasn’t fake or imagined, but it was not sustainable, I don’t think.

  I’d gone over to the table where he was sitting to fill the order – strong black coffee – Clara had taken before she slopped off for a sneaky cigarette, and hadn’t really looked at the man at the table. I’d stopped looking at the customers when I kept seeing men who looked like men I’d escorted. Some of them probably were them, but other men – innocent men – had the look of them that sent chills through me.

  Also, I sometimes felt that the scars I had on the inside were visible on the outside so I had to hide myself away, to stop people staring, to stop people wondering, to stop feeling like a freak of nature.

  No one cared about my scars – and they wouldn’t even if they were on the outside – because people are too wrapped up in their own lives, their own loves, their traumas. You, especially if you are stranger, are too insignificant for them to notice. I know this, but I still hang my head, avoid the eyes of others in case their looks, however fleeting, exposes my scars and imperfections to the world.

  ‘Just Eve as I live and breathe,’ he said when I settled the cup on the table.

  My eyes flew up to find his and our gazes collided.

  ‘That rhymed,’ he said. ‘Did you notice that?’

  I couldn’t help but smile at him, and he grinned back at me.

  ‘Jack,’ I said. And I heard in my voice that I still had feelings for him, and I heard, too, that it wasn’t the same. I wasn’t the same, I suppose. Like I grew out of reading romance books, I’d grown out of being a fool in love.

  ‘You said my name,’ he replied, his voice was different too, he’d grown out of being that fool as well. ‘You never said it after that first time we met.’

  ‘That’s because I always thought of you as Jack Britcham, not simply Jack, for some reason, and I didn’t imagine for one minute you’d understand why I did it.’

  ‘Why did you do it?’ he asked, and I knew immediately what he meant.

  I shrugged and shook my head. ‘Just because.’

  ‘Wasn’t it good?’ he asked carefully and quietly.

  ‘It was fantastic, Jack, really. It couldn’t have been better, but … it was what it was.’ It was the most incredible few hours of my life.

  ‘Even though Fate so clearly wants us to be together, I take it a drink is out of the question?’ he asked.

  ‘No, it’s not.’

  ‘You’ll come out with me? On a date?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’ he asked, baffled.

  ‘Just because.’

  ‘Can I have your number then?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied, and the shock lit up his face again. He could have my number and I would go for a drink with him because I’ve been thinking a lot about moments of happiness. Jack featured in one of my biggest moments of joy. I only had a few, and I wanted to collect more. If there was even the smallest chance that he could be a part of another moment of happiness or even just of fun, then I was going to take that chance. I had nothing to lose and everything to gain. I was no longer going to martyr myself.

  So, what began as an ordinary day became a good one. I had to go back to work and he sat and drank his coffee, and we kept looking at each other until he left. The tip he left – a fiver – was under a small square of white card. I knew what it was before I p
icked it up: it was his business card, of course. I turned it over and in my handwriting was the note I had written him all those years and lifetimes ago.

  I tucked it into my bra and liked the feel of it there as I went back to serving customers (had to give Clara the fiver, of course).

  Phone is ringing and I know it’s going to be him.

  Eve

  May 1999 (another update)

  I’d forgotten how lovely it is to kiss Jack. Truly, I had. And kissing him is out of this world. I think we do most of that, although we do a lot of the other thing and that is incredible, too, but it took us a couple of months to go back there. Yes, I wrote that right – months.

  We both had our reasons for waiting. I guess his were because I’d run out on him after the first time and he hadn’t done it with anyone else since me, which I was surprised at. But Jack seems to have remarkable self-restraint. While he likes the act itself, I’m sure, he doesn’t feel the need to do it all the time whenever the chance presents itself to him. And I’m pretty sure it presents itself to him on a regular basis because women present themselves to him on a regular basis. It’s odd that I didn’t notice it before, but women do stop and look at him when we’re out together. My self-consciousness about the internal scars that might be obvious and visible to others make me hyper-vigilant, but Jack is excellent camouflage because when I’m with him, I become invisible.

  Women smile at him all the time, some say hello, others strike up conversation, and others still even offer him their number – even if he is holding my hand or has his arm around me. It doesn’t matter to these women because most of them are posh, rich girls who know I am not one of them and know he is one of theirs and do not see me as anything other than his plaything.

  I love that Jack always introduces me into the conversation, and has more than once turned to me and said, ‘I don’t know, do we want to take (insert posh girl’s name) number?’ It throws them because, I guess, he wasn’t brought up to be so rude to one of his own. To be rude to a commoner like me, I’m sure they think nothing of it. But what I’m trying to say, of course, is that Jack could have had several women in the gap between our meetings, but he hasn’t. I could tell from the way he was around me that he’d been hanging on to the hope of us meeting again. I wonder sometimes how long he would have waited.