She steadied herself, not letting him see it.
‘You …’ he raised his hands to his head and began to cry. ‘I’m so ashamed of what I did. Never letting you know.’
She tried to fold back time, to imagine seeing Adam at school on the Monday that had followed. How would that have been? If he’d told her then that their night together had been amazing, a shared adventure, despite both of them being so out of it? Would she have believed him then, if he had looked both afraid of rejection and full of hope, and so surely like someone who had committed no crime, who could never want to hurt her or take from her? Would her underwear, clumsily rolled back up her legs, have felt like a sweet, half-arsed attempt at leaving her decent when he had to leave in a hurry? Would she have believed him then?
Becky looked at Adam again and tried to tease him apart, to will him into somehow being different men: her lover, Maisie’s father, her partner in collusion, her friend, her counsellor, her rapist. But none of them had given her the truth.
She won’t forgive him and he won’t forgive himself. They now have that in common, along with a daughter. It will have to be a new wound, one that fits perfectly where she once nursed her questions.
‘How do you feel now?’ Becky asked.
‘I feel trapped,’ Adam said. ‘Like I’m in a prison I’ll never get out of. I don’t feel like I can survive it.’
‘I did,’ said Becky. ‘You will too.’
Then the tears ran down both of their faces; his turned to the floor, hers to the window, her gaze tracking the path of the Thames, snaking to the horizon.
Chapter 30
Becky enters Arlington Square through one of its four gates and stands a while looking out across the flower beds – Union Jack reds, blues and whites – and along the benches lining the central path. A woman sits, reading a book with one hand, pushing a pram back and forth next to her. An elderly couple, in sunhats, summer chinos and dress respectively, sit hand in hand, enjoying the sun.
She checks her phone. Perhaps Amber has changed her mind? There is a WhatsApp thread from Maisie and Adam debating what kind of a cake to make for his mum’s birthday. Back and forth their messages go, each one like a stitch binding their minutes together.
Becky looks up and sees Amber at the end of the square, seated on a bench next to a paved area, partially shielded by an olive tree. Becky plots a course along a line of fudge-coloured flint and beach stones buried into the concrete, and thinks about how Amber could pass for any young, slim Islington professional, maybe someone who has just moved into her first house, paid for by a collection of parents: oversized sunglasses propped against her Rapunzel-golden hair, dressed down in cropped jeans and loafers.
Actors so often look smaller in real life than they do on screen, but when Becky saw the magazine pictures of Amber exiting court after her testimony, she wasn’t just small, she was downright thin, utterly vulnerable, childlike. The facts of Amber’s last suicide attempt had pushed at Becky’s thoughts. It wouldn’t take much to end a life as fragile as hers seemed in the pictures of that day on those courtroom steps, under a winter sun.
But she looks better today. There is colour in her cheeks. She seems slim, not skeletal. She has been working; Becky knows this from following her on Twitter, on the account she once used to spy on Scott, back when he had been her rapist. Amber has been heard and believed. She is not a lunatic after all.
They won’t prosecute, Adam had told her, way back when the question of what she might owe Amber had seemed in the balance. And yet they had taken it to court, despite the paucity of evidence. In fact, Matthew’s own arrogance had seen to that.
The trial had begun in winter, on a day when the heating had broken down in the courthouse.
It was here that Becky learned that the day after Matthew had given her his side of events, he had volunteered a statement to the police. He must have been sure, at that point, that Becky’s silence was sealed. He had her loyalty.
Perhaps then he felt he could afford to rewrite the narrative, with Becky’s place in it wiped as surely as his CCTV footage.
There was history between Amber and I. An affair. A few separate nights in London at my club and one, perhaps two, weekends, out of London. I ended it soon after the Hampshire weekend because she was needy, a little unstable. The girl needed a boyfriend and some therapy. I’d said I would be happy for her to seek my advice any time, because the film business is capricious and tricky to navigate. It chews people up and spits them out. I like to be able to help.
I called her up the following weekend to say the kids were out of town so she should come to the house to sort things once and for all. I thought I could give her some useful numbers for people. A psychiatrist, for one thing.
He told the police: We drank a lot. I was having a nice time.
He said: She sat on my lap. She wasn’t wearing any knickers. It was a seduction.
Amber, in her evidence, instead offered: He came and sat next to me on the sofa. Put his hand up my skirt and tried to pull my knickers off. I told him no, but I did kiss him. I
