Page 61 of Behind Her Eyes

I walk quickly through the streets of the affluent suburb, mumbling the occasional apology as I barge through prams and strolling pedestrians, but not slowing my pace. There are a lot of cafes and restaurants here, but I focus on those closest to the clinics. If I’d been able to log into work then I probably could have checked which clinic David had come from, but he’s shut that avenue down, and if anyone ever told me, my brain has forgotten.

In one dead end, I order a bacon roll I don’t want, and when I find out there’s no Marianne there, I leave and dump it in the bin outside. Two take-away coffees follow and still no Marianne. I want to weep with frustration even though I’ve been here barely an hour. I have no patience left.

Finally, I find it. A small, chintzy, but on the right side of sweet rather than tasteless, cafe and tea shop down a quiet cobbled mews that you’d miss unless you knew it was there. I can see why David would come here. It’s homely looking. Welcoming. I know it’s the right place before I’ve even stepped inside. I can feel it. Just like I know when I see the earthy woman behind that counter that the answer to, ‘Are you Marianne?’ is going to be yes.

And it is. She’s older than me, maybe close to forty, and she has the tanned, toughened skin of someone who holidays in the sun maybe three or four times a year and relishes hours by the pool. She’s attractive, but not beautiful, and she has no wedding ring. Her eyes are kind though. I see that straight away.

‘I really need to talk to you,’ I say, my face flushing. ‘About David and Adele Martin. I think you knew them?’ The cafe isn’t busy, only a well turned-out older couple enjoying a full breakfast and the newspapers in one corner, and a businessman sipping a coffee and working on his laptop in another. She can’t use being too busy as an excuse.

She stiffens. ‘I have nothing to say about them,’ she says. The kindness has gone from her eyes. Now I see hurt and defensiveness and anger at someone forcing a memory of something wanted forgotten.

‘Please,’ I say. ‘I wouldn’t have come all this way to find you if it wasn’t important.’ I hope she can see the utter desperation in my own gaze. Woman to woman. Perhaps victim to victim.

She does. After a moment’s hesitation, she lets out a long sigh and says, ‘Take a seat. Tea or coffee?’

I choose a table by the window and she joins me with two mugs of tea. I start to try to explain myself, to tell her something of what’s brought me here, why I need to hear her story, but she cuts in, stopping me.

‘I’ll tell you what happened, but I don’t want to know anything more about them. Abouther. Okay?’

I nod.Her.Adele. Oh God, oh God, oh God.

‘There was never anything in it, David and me. He was too young for a start, and he was a nice, quiet man. He’d come in early, have a coffee and sit and stare out of the window. I always thought he looked sad, and I hate to see people sad, so I started chatting to him. Not much at first, just in the way I try to, but then slowly we started to talk more, and he was charming and funny. I was newly divorced and feeling raw and it was like having free therapy.’ She smiles, almost wistful. ‘We’d joke about that. How I was paying him in coffee. Anyway, that’s how it was. She came in once or twice too, before I knew who she was. Right at the beginning. I was struck by her beauty. She was the kind of woman you remember.’

‘Like a movie star,’ I mutter, and she nods.

‘Yes, that’s it. Almost too beautiful. I didn’t know she was his wife. She didn’t say. She just drank her peppermint tea and sat and studied the place. It made me feel slightly uncomfortable, as if I was being inspected by the health board. But that was in the early days, and she didn’t come back after that. Not here, anyway.’

It all sounds so innocent, I can’t imagine what went wrong. My heart, despite everything else, thumps in relief that there was no affair. David has not done what he did with me, before. Adele was wrong, about this woman at any rate. I trust Marianne. She has no reason to lie to me.

‘So what happened?’

‘He started to open up to me a little. He might have been the psychiatrist, but when you’ve worked in the service industry as long as I have you develop your own way with people. I say he opened up, but actually it was more that he talkedaroundthings, if you know what I mean. I told him I thought that under his witty exterior he always seemed slightly unhappy, and we talked about love. He asked me once if it was possible to love someone so much that it makes you completely blind to them for a while. I told him that’s what love is at its heart. Only seeing the good in someone. I said love was a kind of madness in itself, because I must have been mad to stay with my John as long as I did.’

‘I thinkyoushould be a psychiatrist,’ I say. We’re warming to each other. A support group of two.

‘After that he started turning up half an hour or so before I opened, and I’d make us both breakfast. I’d probe him a bit more, and eventually, one day he said that he did a thing a long time ago that was wrong. He thought at the time that he was protecting the woman he loved, but it was always there between them and then, after a while, he began to worry that there was something very wrong with her. She wasn’t who he thought she was. He wanted to leave, but she was holding this thing he’d done against him as a threat. To keep him. She said she’d ruin him.’

She’s looking out of the window rather than at me, and I know she’s back in that time, those moments I’m making her relive. ‘I told him that the truth was always better out than in, and he should face this wrong thing he’d done, whatever it was. He said he’d thought about that a lot. It was all he thought about. But he was worried that if he did, and he had to go to prison, then there would be no one to stop her hurting someone else.’

My heart races and I barely feel my hands burning as they grip the hot mug. ‘Did he ever tell you what this wrong thing was?’ Rob. It’s something to do with Rob. I know it.

She shakes her head. ‘No, but I got the feeling it was something bad. Maybe he would have told me eventually, but thensheturned up at my door.’

‘Adele?’

Her mouth has twisted into a sour pout at the mention of the name, but she nods. ‘She came to my house. She must have followed me home one day. She told me to stay out of her marriage. She said I couldn’t have David and that he belonged to her. I was shocked and tried to tell her that there was nothing going on, and after what happened when my own husband cheated I wouldn’t do that to another woman, but she wasn’t listening. She was furious. Beyond furious.’

I wouldn’t do that to another woman.Marianne is a better person than me. It’s my turn to look away, even though I’m listening intently, sucking in her every word to savour later.

‘She told me to stop talking to him,’ she continues, oblivious to my sharp pang of guilt. ‘To stop advising him if I knew what was good for me. She said he wasn’t going to leave her and that he loved her and whatever was in their past was their business and theirs alone.’ She pauses and sips her tea. ‘I felt awful. Mortified, even though I hadn’t done anything wrong. I told her we were friends and that was it. She said I was a miserable old woman with only a cat for company and no man would ever look at me. It was such a childish insult that I actually laughed at it. Shock, I think, but I laughed all the same. That was probably my mistake.’

‘Did you tell David?’

‘No. I was actually surprised when he turned up at the cafe the next morning, to be honest. I’d presumed he must have told her about our conversations because how else could she have known about them?’

How else indeed.How far can you go, Adele?I can just imagine Adele hovering above them, invisible, as they talked. How angry she must have been. The image leads immediately to that of her hovering above my bed watching me fuck her husband.Oh God.

‘But he acted like nothing had happened. He looked tired, yes. Unhappy, yes. Hungover, probably. But certainly not as if he’d told his wife all about our conversations. I created the opportunity to say he should talk to her about their problems. He said they were beyond that and that she never understood. I was obviously feeling quite uncomfortable about it all, so I told him what I really thought. That he should stop talking to me about it, but if he was that unhappy then he should leave her and hang the consequences. I was angry with her by then, after the shock of her visit had worn off. She was a harpy, I thought. The kind of woman nothing would ever be good enough for. He’d be better off out of it.’

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