Nicci French - Killing Me Softly

He frowned. ‘I want you to.’

We came out of the shop with two bags full of clothes that had cost more than my monthly pay packet. I was wearing the black trousers with a cream satin shirt. I thought of Jake saving up to buy me my coat and how his face had looked so eager and proud when he had handed it to me.

‘I feel like a kept woman.’

‘Listen.’ He stopped in the middle of the pavement and people flowed past us. ‘I want to keep you for ever.’

He had this knack for making flippant remarks turn deadly serious. I blushed and laughed but he stared at me, scowled almost.

‘Can I take you out for dinner?’ I asked. ‘I want you to tell me about your life.’

First, though, I had to collect some things from the flat. I had left my address book there, my diary, all my work things. Until I had got them, I would feel I was half there still. With a sick feeling in my stomach, I rang Jake at work, but he wasn’t there; they said he was ill. I rang the flat and he answered on the first ring.

‘Jake, it’s Alice,’ I said foolishly.

‘I recognized your voice,’ he replied drily.

‘Are you unwell?’

‘No.’

There was a silence.

‘Listen, I’m sorry but I need to come round and collect a few things.’

‘I’ll be at work during the daytime tomorrow. Do it then.’

‘I haven’t got my keys any more.’

I could hear him breathing on the other end. ‘You really burnt your bridges, didn’t you, Alice?’

We arranged that I should call in at six thirty. There was another pause. Then we both said goodbye, politely, and I put the phone down.

It’s amazing how you don’t really need to work at work, what you can get away with when you don’t care. I wish I’d discovered that before now. Nobody seemed to have noticed how late I had arrived that morning or how long I took for lunch. I went to another meeting in the afternoon, where once again I said very little and was congratulated afterwards by Mike for being so incisive. ‘You appear very in control of things at the moment, Alice,’ he said nervously. Giovanna had said almost the same thing in an e-mail earlier in the day. I shuffled paper round my desk, slid most of it into the bin, and told Claudia not to put calls through. At just after five thirty I went into the ladies’ and brushed my hair, washed my face, put lipstick on my sore lips and buttoned my coat up firmly so that no trace of my new, glossy clothes could be seen. Then I took my old familiar route back to the flat.

I was early, and I walked around for a bit. I didn’t want to take Jake by surprise, before he was prepared for me, and I certainly didn’t want to meet him on the street. I tried to think what I should say to him. The act of breaking off from him had immediately turned him into a stranger, someone more precious and vulnerable than the ironic, modest Jake I had lived with. At a few minutes past six thirty, I went to the door and pressed the buzzer. I heard feet running down the stairs, saw a shape approaching through the frosted glass.

‘Hello, Alice.’

It was Pauline.

‘Pauline.’ I didn’t know what to say to her. My best friend; the one I would have turned to in any other circumstance. She stood in the doorway. Her dark hair was tied up in a stern knot. She looked tired: there were faint smudges under her eyes. She wasn’t smiling. I realized that I was seeing her as if we had been apart from each other for months, not just a couple of days.

‘Can I come in?’

She stood aside and I walked past her, up the stairs. My rich clothes whispered against my skin, under Jake’s coat. Everything looked the same in the flat, of course it did. My jackets and scarves still hung on the hooks in the hall. A photograph of Jake and me, arm in arm and grinning widely, still stood on the mantelpiece. My red moccasin slippers lay on the living-room floor, near the sofa where we’d sat on Sunday. The daffodils I had bought at the end of last week still stood in the vase, though a little droopy. There was a cup on the table half full of tea,and I was sure it was the same cup I’d been drinking from two days ago. I felt bewildered and sat down heavily on the sofa. Pauline stayed standing, looking down at me. She hadn’t said a word.

‘Pauline,’ I croaked. ‘I know that what I’ve done is awful, but I had to.’

‘Do you want me to forgive you, then?’ she asked. Her voice was withering.

‘No.’ That was a lie, of course I did. ‘No, but you are my closest friend. I thought, well, I’m not cold or heartless. There’s nothing I can say in my defence, except that I just fell in love. Surely you can understand that.’

I saw her wince. Of course she could understand that. Eighteen months ago she’d been left, too, because he had just fallen in love. She sat down at the other end of the sofa, as far away from me as possible.

‘The thing is this, Alice,’ she began, and I was struck by how we were even talking to each other differently now, more formally and pedantically. ‘If I allowed myself to, of course I could understand. After all, you weren’t married, you didn’t have children. But I don’t want to understand, you see. Not at the moment. He’s my big brother and he’s been badly hurt.’ Her voice wavered and, for a few seconds, she sounded like the Pauline I knew. ‘Honestly, Alice, if you could see him now, if you could see how wrecked he is, then you wouldn’t…’ But she stopped herself. ‘Maybe some day we can be friends again, but I’d feel like I was betraying him or something if I listened to your side of the story and tried to imagine how you must be feeling.’ She stood up. ‘I don’t want to be fair to you, you see. Actually, I want to hate you.’

I nodded and stood up too. I did see, of course I did. ‘I’ll get some clothes, then.’

She nodded and went into the kitchen. I could hear her filling the kettle.

In the bedroom, everything was as it always had been. I took my suitcase down from the top of the wardrobe and placed it open on the floor. By my side of the neatly-made double bed was the book I had been in the middle of reading about the history of clocks. By Jake’s side, was the climbing book. I took them both and put them in the case. I opened the cupboard doors and started to slip clothes off hangers. My hands were shaking and I couldn’t fold them properly. I didn’t take many, anyway: I couldn’t imagine wearing clothes I had worn before; I couldn’t believe that they would still fit me.

I stared into the wardrobe, where my things hung among Jake’s: my dresses next to his only good suit, my skirts and tops among his work shirts that were ironed and neatly buttoned on to their hangers. A couple of his shirts had frayed cuffs. Tears pricked my eyes and I blinked them away furiously. What was I going to need? I tried to picture my new life with Adam and found that I couldn’t. I could only imagine bed with him. I packed a couple of jerseys, some jeans and T-shirts, two workaday suits, and all my underwear. I took my favourite sleeveless dress and two pairs of shoes and abandoned all the rest – there was so much of it, all those shopping sprees with Pauline, all those greedy, delighted purchases.

I shovelled all my creams, lotions and makeup into the case but hesitated over my jewellery. Jake had given me quite a lot of it: several pairs of earrings, a lovely pendant, a wide copper bracelet. I didn’t know if it would be more hurtful to take them or not. I pictured him, this evening, coming into the room and finding out what I had removed, and what I had left behind, and trying to read my feelings from such insubstantial clues. I took the earrings my grandmother had left me when she died, and the things I had had before Jake. Then I changed my mind, and took everything out of the little drawer and chucked it in the case.