rages, it’s not worth it. Life’s too short. Don’t you see?’ I clinked my glass against hers. ‘To friendship,’ I said.
And she said, ‘To coming through.’
Deborah walked me home afterwards. I didn’t ask her up and we kissed goodbye at the door. I climbed upstairs, to the flat I was going to move out of next week. This weekend I would have to pack my few possessions and decide what to do with Adam’s. They still lay all round the rooms: his faded jeans; his T-shirts, and rough jerseys that smelt of him so that if I closed my eyes I could believe he was still there in the room, watching me; his leather jacket that seemed to hold the shape of him still; his backpack stuffed with climbing gear; the photographs he had taken of me with his Polaroid. Only his precious scuffed climbing boots were gone: Klaus – dear Klaus with his face swollen by weeping – had laid them on his coffin. Boots instead of flowers. So he didn’t leave very much at all. He had always travelled light.
I had thought, immediately afterwards, that I wouldn’t be able to stay in this flat for an hour, for a single minute. Actually, I had found it perversely hard to leave. But on Monday I would close the brand new door, double lock it, and hand the keys to the agent. I would take my bags and bits and get a taxi to my new home, a comfortable one-bedroom apartment very near work, with a small patio, a washing-machine, a microwave, central heating and thick carpets. Pauline had once said to me, after she was through the worst of her stunned unhappiness, that if you behave as if you are all right, then one day you will be. You have to go through the motions of surviving in order to survive. Water finds its way into the ditches you have dug for it. So I would buy a car. Maybe I would get a cat. I would start learning French again and buying clothes. I would arrive at work early each morning and I knew I could do my new job well. I would see all my old friends. A kind of life could flow into these prepared spaces; not a bad life, really. People looking at me would never guess that these things meant little; that I felt as deep and empty and sad as the sky.
I could never slide back into my old self. My self before him. Most people would never know. Jake, happy with his new girlfriend, wouldn’t know. He would look back on the end of our affair and remember the pain and the mess and embarrassment, but it would be a dim memory and would lose all power to hurt him, if it hadn’t already. Pauline, heavily pregnant, wouldn’t know either. She had asked me, very shyly, if I would consider being her child’s godmother and I had kissed her on both cheeks and said that I didn’t believe in God but, yes, I would be very proud. Clive, ricocheting from attachment to attachment, would think of me as the woman who had known true romantic love; he would ask me for advice every time he wanted to go out with a woman or wanted to leave her. And I could never tell my family, or his, or Klaus and the community of climbers, or anyone at work.
To all of them, I was the tragic widow of the hero who had died too young, by his own hand. They spoke to me and probably of me with a hushed kind of respect and sorrow. Sylvie knew, of course, but I couldn’t speak to her about it. Poor Sylvie, who had thought she was acting for the best. She had come to the funeral and afterwards, in a frantic whisper, had begged my forgiveness. I said that I forgave – what else could I say? – and then turned and continued speaking to someone else.
I was tired, but I was not sleepy. I made myself a cup of tea which I drank out of one of Adam’s pewter mugs, a mug that had hung from his backpack when we went to the Lake District for our honeymoon, that dark and starry night. I sat on the sofa in my dressing-gown, legs tucked under me, and thought about him. I thought about the first time I had set eyes on him, across the road and gazing at me, hooking me with his stare, reeling me in. I thought about the last time, in the police station, when he had smiled at me so sweetly, letting me go. He must have known it was the end. We had never said goodbye. It had begun in rapture and finished in terror and now in such loneliness.
A few days ago, Clive had met me for lunch and, after all the exclamations of distress and support, had asked, ‘How will anyone ever measure up to him, Alice?’
Nobody ever would. Adam had murdered seven people. He would have murdered me even while he wept over my body. Every time I remembered the way he used to look at me, with such intensely focused love, or saw in my mind’s eye his dead body swinging slowly on the yellow rope, I also remembered that he was a rapist and a killer. My Adam.
But, after everything, I still remembered his lovely face and how he had held me in his arms and stared into my eyes and said my name, so tenderly, and I didn’t want to forget that someone had loved me so much, so very much. It’s you I want, he had said, only you. Nobody would ever love me like that again.
I stood up and opened the window. A group of young men walked past on the street below, lit by the lamp, laughing drunkenly. One of them looked up and, seeing me there at the window, blew me a kiss and I waved at him and smiled and turned away. Oh, it has been such a sad story, my love, my heart.
