‘Cora!’ I shout into the silver intercom as the rain hammers down noisily. ‘I know it’s late. But I need help.’
And she lets me in like good friends – whatever I know about those, now – always do.
43
Scarlett
28 July
Here is that good friend, in glasses I’ve never seen her in before and cashmere pyjamas you want to stroke like a kitten.
‘Talk about freaking me out,’ she mutters as she opens the door. ‘You would have to choose the night Michael is away to do a late-night surprise call. What the hell’s happened?’
She looks down at my pyjamas.
‘Wow,’ she says. ‘You do not look good, hon.’
Unlike Cora, even the ‘at home in front of the TV’ version. Slippers that are worth upwards of £300. Brows and lashes dark and groomed as ever. That’s Cora.
‘I need to get to Ed,’ I hiss. ‘I’ll tell you everything later but first, I have to get to Ed. To Poppy. And I need you to drive me.’
She puts her hands on my shoulders.
‘Calm down,’ she says. ‘You need to take ten minutes first to breathe. You look like you’re about to collapse. You don’t want to see him in this state. Tell me what the hell is going on. I’ll put the kettle on.’
She looks at me.
‘Actually, fuck the kettle.’
And then she goes to her drinks cabinet and takes out a bottle of brandy, the drink of the crisis, and pours me one. I don’t argue.
I start speaking as soon as I have the drink in my hand.
Everything that Emma has told me in the last couple of hours is tumbling out, too fast, too messy, in the wrong order, disjointed, with the wrong emphasis. Doesn’t matter. I need to expel it, as fast as I can.
Cora doesn’t ask questions but I give her the answers, as she sits next to me on the sofa.
‘And it was her who shared the video,’ I sob, clutching my glass. ‘Emma! Not even Robert. But Emma. How could Emma be capable of that?’
I look at her and wait for the shocked reaction, the horror.
But Cora is still staring straight ahead, no matter what I reveal, saying nothing.
I tell myself it’s because she is taking in the shock. Recalibrating what she knows about Emma, her friend of twenty years. Maybe even doubting me, wondering if I’ve had a breakdown and invented this.
I glance at her again.
‘Why are you not answering me?’ I ask, uneasy. ‘I’m telling the truth.’
She nods. ‘Just taking it in,’ she says quietly.
Right.
But still.
This isn’t the Cora I know who would want the gossip, the details. To gasp and rant about Emma’s disloyalty and what a bitch she is and how she plans to freeze her out of having any sort of local social life in this area, ever.
I would expect another reaction too: for her to pretend to be one step ahead of it all. ‘I always knew there was something weird about her’, even if I knew that wasn’t true.
I look at Cora again. Face straight ahead. Like she’s watching the road while driving in bad visibility.
What’s going on?
My stomach does a forward roll.
Good friends.
‘What’s happening, Cora?’
She stays silent.
‘Cora.’ I’m louder now.
‘Relax,’ she says. ‘I’ll tell you. We just need … a chat.’
And I stay there, because I have to trust some people, sometimes. Maybe she has important information about Emma. Maybe she did suspect something. Maybe this is all about to make sense.
But in the dark, with the rain angry and beating up the roof, Cora’s newly built WAG mansion, out here up this isolated country road, is not idyllic, it’s threatening. Same image, different perspectives. Like Emma.
Could Emma be here? I suddenly think. They are tight. Has she persuaded Cora that I’m the one in the wrong? I look around at the closed door to the kitchen. To the spiral staircase that leads upstairs. To the door that leads down to the cellar.
I glance at Cora.
‘Come on then,’ I say. ‘Are you going to tell me that you knew about Emma?’
She nods. Shivers, in her very cold house. ‘Yeah. I knew.’
I’m mad now, furious. ‘When?’
She says nothing.
‘What is wrong with you?’ I prompt. ‘God, Cora. I thought we were close.’
She starts laughing then. ‘Oh come on, Scarlett, don’t be a child.’
Between them, they are bastardising the last year of my life.
‘When I stayed at your house? That wasn’t friendship?’
She laughs again. ‘No, Scarlett, that was drinking.’
She pauses. Quieter.
‘And you know Emma and I have been mates for years.’
‘Yeah,’ I say, tears threatening now. ‘So that’s where your loyalty lies. Even when she’s done this to me.’
Cora carries on laughing at me and suddenly, it’s one too many times. One too many times of being laughed at, somewhere, in some home, behind some screen, even if I didn’t see the teeth bared or the sound emitted. One too many mocking tones. One too many feelings of paranoia.
‘When did you figure out that it was Emma?’ I demand.
Something occurs to me before she can answer.
‘Does Asha know too?’
Cora laughs louder then and it’s unpleasant. ‘For someone who rates herself so much, Scarlett, you have a shocking sense of judgement.’
She doesn’t expand.
Fuck this. I’ll get a cab to Ed’s brother’s. I stand up to leave.
‘Stay,’ she says.
But I’m done, with all of it.
I ignore her and walk towards the front door.
‘I think you’ll want to know what I’ve got to say,’ she says, breezy. ‘Plus I’ve locked the gate.’
I turn to look at her and she indicates the intimidating intercom system on the wall with a remote control in her hand.
So I do as I am told and it occurs to me then that this new life of mine involves a lot of doing what
