The Woman He Loved Before Page 7

  ‘Your dad couldn’t have done anything else, Jack, surely you see that? You’re his son, he couldn’t let you be subjected to that for a second longer than necessary. That’s what parents do. Surely you can understand that.’

  ‘Of course, I can understand. But at the time … things have been so very difficult and complicated with my father for years. It’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t grown up with a man like him as a father. I used to idolise him – he’s so successful at everything he does – and I wanted to be exactly like him. But when I got to fifteen, and it came to the time where I had to prove that I wanted to be like him in every way, I couldn’t do it. Since then he’s made it clear that I’m not good enough, not manly enough in the way that he is. I can’t do right in his eyes – I prefer football to rugby, I got “easy” offers for Oxford and Cambridge, chose Oxford when he went to Cambridge, but I didn’t get a first. I followed in his footsteps into law but wouldn’t let him help me get a job. That’s why I was so enraged that with this – this thing that I was going through that he couldn’t possibly understand – he had to come riding in to try to make things better again. He had to fix it and fix my pathetic life, as he saw it, in the process.

  ‘I wanted to knock his block off but, at the same time, I wanted him – anyone, really – to look after me. I was so confused and angry. I didn’t resist when he and my mother packed up some of my belongings and moved me into their home. They took over most of the funeral arrangements and told me what to do on the day, what to say, where to stand, who to thank for their condolences. I don’t think of that day as Eve’s funeral because it was nothing like she would have wanted.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘It was elaborate and showy, and because she had no family there were lots of people there she barely knew. They had sermons and readings and hymns when she’d never set foot in a church in her adult life. I was simply grateful I could play the grieving husband and not participate. I sat on the sidelines, dressed in black, nodding and shaking hands and accepting cups of tea.’

  ‘You weren’t playing the grieving husband, you were the grieving husband.’

  ‘What I mean is, me being quiet in the background fitted in with their idea of what a grieving husband is like. Whereas in reality, being there was something I had to do. It wasn’t my chance to say goodbye as it should have been – I did that much later, when I went to Bartholomew Square on what would have been our wedding anniversary and sat and watched people coming out after getting married. I watched them start their lives together, remembering that feeling. That was the day I said goodbye to Eve.’

  ‘You got married in Brighton Register Office?’

  ‘Yes. Like I said, she wasn’t the showy type. We wanted a small wedding with minimal fuss. She wore a dress she’d had for years and the only two people there were Grace and Rupert as our witnesses.’

  I was humbled by Eve. By the love Jack obviously had for her. By the way he wanted to suffer because she was gone from his life, and by the way they had obviously conducted their relationship: privately, quietly, intimately. I never would have thought that someone like Jack – someone who drove an expensive car, wore almost exclusively designer clothes, and had a big house – would have married in such a small, unassuming way.

  Eve obviously did that to him – brought out the quiet side of him, brought out the side of him that I had fallen in love with. Eve must have been extraordinary.

  Was I like that to him? Because he still had his ostentatious side. He still had moments when he wanted to be flash and play the big ‘I AM’ and it pulled me up short. It sounded as though Eve had been able to temper that in him: straight away or over time?

  ‘What else do you want to know?’ he asked, wearily. He did not want to say any more and I did not want to know any more because I was suddenly so scared by the love and grief he had for her. It was huge and it was unassailable; and it probably meant he would never have enough room in his heart for me. He would be constantly trying to fit me around the expanse that Eve still occupied.

  ‘Erm, nothing,’ I said. ‘Well, not nothing. I mean, this is big stuff we’ve talked about, so how about we talk again another time?’

  Jack lifted his head, studied me for a few seconds. ‘Are you sure? I don’t want you to feel as if I’m hiding things from you.’

  ‘I don’t think you’re hiding anything from me. It’s just this is getting a bit intense: maybe we should take a step back.’

  He was up on his knees in an instant, frowning at me. ‘Are you saying you don’t want to get married?’

  Was that what I was saying? I hadn’t consciously meant that, but now he’d broached it, maybe that was what I was hinting at. I was starting to think that perhaps he wasn’t ready. You don’t get over that kind of love in three years; you probably don’t ever get over it. Why would you want to marry someone when your heart belonged to another?

  ‘Maybe we should date for a bit longer? There’s no rush is there? We should carry on dating and—’

  ‘I’ve only been in love with two women in my life,’ he interrupted. ‘Eve and now you. They’re different types of love, because you’re different women. But, Libby, make no mistake about this: I love you and I want to spend the rest of my life with you.’

  Breathing deeply, a slow steady in and out, I looked down at the valleys and hills that our bodies made in my white duvet cover.

  ‘I can’t pretend Eve didn’t exist,’ he said, ‘in the same way that I can’t pretend that you’re not the most important person in my life right now. I love you as much as I love her. Loved her.’

  ‘I know bugger all about long-term relationships, and I know nothing about marriage having never been in either, but I do know I’m—’

  ‘Scared that I don’t love you as much as I loved Eve? That I won’t be able to love you as much because I’m still in love with her?’

  I hung my head and nodded, ashamed at how petulant and childish that sounded when repeated back to me. I hated sounding so needy, so unsure of myself.

  ‘I promise you, she is the past. You are my present and my future. I can’t rewrite my past, and I wouldn’t want to, but,’ he came closer to me, took my hands and waited until I raised my head to look at him, ‘I love you.’

  It was different this time when he said it. He’d said it before and it was a wonderful thing to hear, but this time there was a new element – a reassurance that in his heart I had the greater part. In every part of him that felt anything, it was me he felt it for. This time, I couldn’t mistake what those three words meant: ‘You. Only you.’

  I nodded my understanding.

  ‘Will you still marry me?’ he asked through his huge grin.

  I nodded again.

  His beam took over his entire face. ‘We’re going to be so happy, you’ll see. I promise you, we’re going to be so happy.’

  jack

  The first time I noticed Libby was a few minutes after I started talking to her. It was after she told me that I was rubbish at apologising and I was rubbish at taking the piss out of her.

  She’d intrigued me by walking out of the showroom when I interrupted her car purchase, but it was the way contempt curled her lip and raised her eyebrow while causing her nostrils to flare that got that kick going down below. She didn’t notice me scanning her body as she stormed away from me: the slenderness of her legs in jeans sloping up to the neat curve of her bum; the firm, fullness of her waist and chest; the gentle shape of her neck disappearing under her masses and masses of shiny, straight black hair.

  When Libby glared at me, resolutely refusing to be drawn in by my second apology, I saw her all over again and felt an unfamiliar boom, as powerful as a bomb exploding, in my chest. It was the explosion of something I thought had died a long time ago. I liked her. And, at that time, I did not like many people. I was not capable of liking people, especially not women, especially not in a non-sexual way. I was consumed by a selfishness and arrogance that I didn’t
dare let go of until I found a new persona to hide behind. I suddenly had a reason to want to be someone else because the woman in front of me would accept nothing short of a personality transplant.

  ‘You’ll get no arguments on that from me,’ she replied when I said I’d been an idiot for messing about with Gareth’s sale, and I knew there and then I had to change. Grace had been telling me for months that I couldn’t carry on indefinitely doing what I was doing – screwing women and then saying I wasn’t ready for a relationship but that I wanted to be friends. Grace was right, of course, but I hadn’t heeded that until Libby stood in front of me and told me she didn’t like me.

  I suddenly felt like a teenager in love with the best-looking girl at school – desperate to get her to notice me; eager to be given a chance.

  I sit by her bed now, watching her sleep her drug-induced slumber, holding her right hand between my two hands as if in prayer. I want to pray for her and for us, but I fell out with God a long time ago, so it would be churlish to go back to Him now – especially if He answers in the way He did last time, if He lets the woman I’m married to die.

  ‘Libby, my beautiful, beautiful Libby,’ I whisper into the hush of her hospital room. The whole of the left side of her body is bruised and swollen, huge sections of her face and head are covered in dressings. She is wounded and hurt, battered and almost broken.

  From a distance she is a mass of bandages and damage, but closer there are pieces of her that are as they were before.

  The curve of her jaw on the right side of her face is untouched. I noticed the bone structure of her features and jaw when she lifted her head to catch the rain as the sky opened on that July afternoon – I’d wanted to reach out and trace my finger along the outline of her face.

  Her full, rounded lips don’t have any marks from the crash either. I’d wanted to kiss the flakes of croissants off those lips when we had breakfast in the park, and again that night as we stood in the hallway but I’d been too scared of where that might lead so I stupidly started ‘the routine’ on her instead.

  Her chestnut-brown eyes, with their large, black pupils, are closed and untouched and they are my most favourite part of her. So much of what she’s about to say begins in her eyes. And I carry the scars of the look in those eyes when I went to see her after we first had sex. She hid her gaze from me until she made me confirm that I regularly seduced and fucked women in my hall – then her eyes had exploded with an agony that had pierced my heart. I thought I’d felt every kind of pain there was to feel three years before, but in that unguarded moment she taught me different.

  Her forehead – the place I’d kissed her after sex – is mostly untouched.

  Every part of her face, damaged or not, is perfect, a reminder of the process – the heady, exhilarating, gut-wrenching, humbling process – of falling in love with her.

  I want her to wake up. I want her to wake up and to speak and to tell me everything will be OK. That’s unfair, I know. It should be the other way around, it should be me being strong and resilient, promising in word and deed that we’ll get through this. How can I, though, when she is lying in a hospital bed looking like this?

  chapter three

  libby

  I have been unconscious for twenty hours. Or so I’ve been told.

  I have woken up in a hospital room surrounded by equipment and with a sense that nothing is real. I feel so disconnected from the world around me and from the body I’m in. I’m not sure if it’s pain or if it’s the painkillers, but I keep wanting to touch things to make sure they are solid and real, but at the same time I’m scared to do so in case they aren’t. In case they melt away or go spongy at my touch – then it would mean I am still asleep. Or never going to wake up.

  My parents, Angela, Grace, Rupert, Caleb, Benji, and Jack’s parents – Harriet and Hector – are waiting outside while the doctor and Jack piece together what has happened. So far they have told me that I was unconscious for twenty hours instead of the planned twenty-four because once they’d reduced the drugs keeping me asleep, I woke up; I lost a lot of blood, and needed a fair amount before and during surgery; I underwent surgery to repair my ruptured spleen, which was a complete success; I have a hairline fracture of a rib on my left side and severe bruising on the others; I have severe bruising on the left side of my body that will get better over time; the crash had been caused by a man using his mobile phone who wasn’t paying attention so misjudged the space he had to do the crazy manoeuvre he tried.

  What they are actually telling me is that I am lucky to be alive. And I keep bursting into tears.

  My weeping doesn’t last very long, but every time I cry the doctor stops talking and waits for me to calm down, to snuffle up my tears or allow them to dry on my face, because I cannot touch anything – least of all myself – in case it is not real. In case I am not real.

  They are keeping something from me, I can tell. I don’t know what it is, but it is something big. I think I can still walk because if I tried to move my legs they would; I know I can speak because I told the doctor my name and the date when he asked.

  I wish they would tell me what is wrong. Thick vines of fear are quickly taking root in my mind and body, and will soon grow out of control and I’ll find it almost impossible to think or breathe.

  I wish, too, that Jack would hold my hand, stand nearer, look at me more. He is so distant, removed, while standing right beside me. If this was real I would be able to feel the heat from his body. Maybe he isn’t here. Maybe he isn’t real. Maybe that is what the doctor is keeping from me. Maybe he died.

  Panicked, suddenly, not caring if the world is spongy and unreal, I reach out an aching, heavy arm to touch him. He is as solid and real as anything can be right now. He is warm, not like a ghost would be. And he flinches. Instinctively, automatically, he flinches at my touch, pulling away slightly. I stop listening to the doctor and shift as much as I can to look at him, to try to understand why he would not want me to touch him.

  ‘Jack?’ I say.

  ‘Libby?’ he replies, turning to me. He is trying to control his face, he is trying not to breakdown. This is about her. About Eve. About me almost doing to him what she did.

  One night, about three months after we decided to get married, he got so drunk he could barely make it to the bedroom in my little flat. When he collapsed fully clothed on the bed, he started asking me to promise I wouldn’t die first. If I had to die, I was to let him know so he could finish himself off and not have to live without me. ‘I can’t,’ he said, ‘bury another wife.’

  He’s probably been holding in the terror that he would have to go through that all over again.

  ‘Nothing,’ I say, easing myself back onto the pillows propping me up. ‘Nothing.’

  Jack nods and returns his attention to the doctor.

  My husband is scared, and hurt, and angry with me too. He had taken my silent refusal to make him any such promise as agreeing that I would not die first. And now, of course, I have nearly broken that promise.

  ‘The final thing I wanted to talk to you about was the lacerations you suffered to your head and face,’ the doctor says gently.

  ‘OK,’ I say, resolving not to cry this time. Jack’s hand suddenly finds mine, making me jump, and the fear squeezes me so tight I can’t breathe.

  ‘There’s no easy way to tell you this, Mrs Britcham, but you sustained rather extensive damage to your scalp, meaning we had to shave away a significant proportion of the left side of your hair in order to be able to repair the damage.’

  My hair? My free hand goes up to my head, but there is a bandage around it and I cannot feel any shaved areas. In fact, I can still feel the soft black strands that make up my hair. I run my fingers through them, and they feel real, they feel like they have not been damaged or shaved. Maybe he is being melodramatic and they only had to take away a small part, which, with clever styling, I can hide until it grows back.

  ‘There has also been some damage to your
face, ostensibly on the left side. We expect you to make a complete recovery from these injuries, and the surgeon who worked on your face did the best he could to not leave a trace, but there will be some scarring.’

  ‘How much scarring?’ I ask cautiously. This is the point where I usually burst into tears, but I do not feel like doing that at the moment. I feel like throwing back the covers and running around, looking for a mirror.

  ‘They were very serious injuries and, as I explained, quite extensive.’ Extensive injuries did not result in ‘some’ scarring.

  I look at Jack. He is staring at the doctor, trying to control his face, trying not to cry. Now I know why Jack hasn’t looked at me: he knows how bad it is.

  ‘I need a mirror,’ I say to the doctor.

  ‘I don’t think that would be helpful right now.’

  ‘I need a mirror!’ I say, desperation and fear making my voice rise.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ the doctor insists evenly. ‘We’ll be removing your dressings then, so you will be able to see your injuries then.’

  Tomorrow? Do you have any idea how far away tomorrow is when something like this has been dropped onto your shoulders?

  ‘I’ll send the nurse in to teach you how to manage your pain relief. Try and get some sleep, Mrs Britcham.’

  ‘Thanks, doctor,’ Jack says as the doctor leaves the room.

  I reach up to the left side of my face, feel the sticky dressing covering a fair portion of it. Most of my face feels thick and swollen and tender. More than a touch causes needles of pain shooting through my face and scalp.

  ‘Is it bad?’ I ask Jack.

  Slowly, as though he can’t avoid it any longer, Jack finally turns to look at me. ‘I don’t know, I haven’t seen anything.’

  ‘But they think it’s bad, don’t they?’