spine, wind in my face. We stopped of one accord and stared at the slow, brown water, full of glinting bubbles and bits of debris and sudden, sucking eddies.
‘You’re mine now,’ he said. ‘My own love.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes. I’m yours.’
When we got back to the flat, late and sleepy on Sunday night, I felt something under my feet on the mat when I went through the door. It was a brown envelope with no name or address on it. Just ‘Flat 3’. Our flat. I opened it and pulled out a single sheet of paper. The message was written in large black felt-tip:
I KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE.
I handed it to Adam. He looked at it and pulled a face.
‘Bored with using the phone,’ I said.
I’d got used to the silent calls, day and night. This seemed different. ‘Somebody came to our door,’ I said. ‘Pushed it through our door.’
Adam seemed unmoved. ‘Estate agents do the same thing, don’t they?’
‘Shouldn’t we call the police? It is simply ridiculous just to let this go on and on and do nothing.’
‘And tell them what? That somebody knows where we live?’
‘It’s for you, I suppose.’
Adam looked serious. ‘I hope so.’
Fifteen
I took the week off work. ‘To prepare for the wedding,’ I said vaguely to Mike, although there was nothing really to prepare. We were going to be married in the morning, in a town hall that looked like the presidential palace of a Stalinist dictator. I would wear the velvet dress Adam had bought me (‘and nothing underneath,’ he’d instructed me), and we would haul two strangers off the street to witness the ceremony. In the afternoon we were driving up to the Lake District. He had somewhere to take me, he said. Then we would come home, and I would go back to work. Perhaps.
‘You deserve time off,’ said Mike enthusiastically. ‘You’ve been working too hard recently.’
I looked at him in surprise. Actually, I had hardly been working at all.
‘Yes,’ I lied. ‘I need a rest.’
There were a few things I needed to do before Friday. The first I had been putting off for a long time.
Jake had arranged to be there when I turned up on Tuesday morning with a rented van to collect the rest of my things. I didn’t particularly want them, but I didn’t want to have them in our old flat either, as if one day I might return to that life, step back into those clothes.
He made me a cup of coffee, but stayed in the kitchen, bent ostentatiously over a folder of work, which I’m sure he hardly looked at. He had shaved that morning, and put on a blue shirt, which I had bought him. I looked away, tried not to see his tired, clever, familiar face. How could I have thought he had made those phone calls or sent those anonymous notes? All my Gothic thoughts died down, and I just felt dreary and a bit sad.
I was as businesslike as possible. I stashed clothes into plastic bags, wrapped china in newspaper and put it into the cardboard boxes I had brought along, pulled books off the shelves and then closed the gaps that marked where they had been. I loaded the chair I’d had as a student into the van, my old sleeping bag, some CDs.
‘I’ll leave my plants, shall I?’ I asked Jake.
‘If you’d prefer.’
‘Yes. And if there’s anything I’ve overlooked…’
‘I know where you live,’ he said.
There was a silence. I swallowed the tepid remains of my coffee, then said, ‘Jake, I’m very sorry. There’s nothing I can say except sorry.’
He looked at me steadily, then smiled, a thin smile. ‘I will be fine, Alice,’ he said then. ‘I haven’t been, but I will be. Will you be fine?’ He put his face closer to mine, until I could no longer focus on it. ‘Will you?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, drawing back. ‘There’s nothing else I can do.’
I had thought of driving to my parents’ house and leaving all the stuff I didn’t need there, but just as I didn’t want things to be waiting for me at Jake’s so I didn’t want them to be waiting for me anywhere at all. I was beginning again, fresh. I had a giddy sense of burning off my past. I stopped at the first Oxfam shop I saw and gave the astonished assistant everything: books, clothes, china, CDs and even my chair.
I had also arranged to see Clive. He had rung me at work, insistent we get together before I got married. On Wednesday we met for lunch at a dark little tavern in Clerkenwell. We kissed each other awkwardly on both cheeks, like amiable strangers, and then sat at a small table by a fire and ordered artichoke soup with hunks of brown bread, and two glasses of house red.
‘How’s Gail?’ I asked.
‘Oh, probably all right. I haven’t seen her that much recently, actually.’
‘Do you mean it’s over?’
He grinned ruefully at me, a flash of the Clive I knew so well and had never stopped feeling uneasy about. ‘Yeah, probably. God, you know how hopeless I am with relationships, Alice. I fall in love, then as soon as it gets serious I panic.’
‘Poor Gail.’
‘I didn’t come to talk about that.’ He poked his spoon moodily into the thick, greenish soup.
‘You wanted to talk to me about Adam, right?’
‘Right.’ He drank some wine, stirred his soup again, then said, ‘Now that I’m here, I don’t know how to say it. This isn’t about Jake, okay? It’s… well, I met Adam remember, and, sure, he made every other man in the room look feeble. But are you sure you know what you’re doing, Alice?’
‘No, but that doesn’t matter.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Literally, it doesn’t matter.’ I found that for the first time since meeting Adam I wanted to talk about how I felt. ‘Look, Clive, I just fell utterly in love with him. Have you ever been desired so much that –’
‘No.’
‘It was like an earthquake.’
‘You used to make fun of me for saying things like that. You used words like 'trust' and 'responsibility'. You used to say’ – he pointed his spoon at me – ‘that only
‘What do you want me to say?’
Clive looked at me with a clinical interest. ‘How did you meet?’ he asked.
‘We saw each other on a street.’
‘And that was that?’
‘Yes.’
‘You just saw each other and leaped into bed?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s just lust, Alice. You can’t throw away your whole life for lust.’
‘Fuck off, Clive.’ He seemed to accept that as a reasonable answer. So I continued, ‘He’s everything. I’d do
