Nicola Rayner - The Girl Before You

‘Better not.’ Alice glances down at the menu. ‘I’m feeling a bit off today.’

Behind George, she notices a mother trying to nurse her baby. Even with a discreet napkin over her shoulder it’s an incongruous place to breast-feed. The woman’s face has the distracted, half-there expression of new motherhood.

‘Maybe you’re right.’ George drops the wine list as quickly as he picked it up. ‘Are you OK, darling?’ He is being peculiar. Oddly attentive and fidgety.

Alice frowns. ‘George, what’s going on?’

He sighs, brushes a hand across his face. ‘Look, I’ve got something to tell you.’

‘Oh.’

‘That girl you mentioned the other night?’

Before he says it, Alice has a sense of déjà vu: she knows, has always known, that this is the thing coming back for them.

‘I have a confession to make: I did know her. We had a sort of thing in my second year. Way before I met you.’

‘A thing?’ says Alice sharply.

‘Well, a fling thing. Yes.’

‘So you lied.’

He shakes his head, adamant. ‘No, not a lie. It wasn’t a lie.’

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘You said you didn’t really know her.’ She looks at his face, right at him.

George drops his gaze to the table. He picks up a knife and puts it down again.

‘It wasn’t important,’ he says quietly. ‘And I didn’t really know her.’

He had made her look stupid again. And in front of their friends. Teddy would have known. Teddy and George knew all of each other’s secrets from college.

‘How long were you together?’ She sounds shrill. The woman breast-feeding looks up. Alice lowers her voice. ‘Were you in love with her?’

George frowns. ‘A matter of weeks, really. No, it wasn’t serious. And it was a long time ago.’

Alice closes her eyes. He’s right, in a way. Why is she so worked up? But she imagines the looks exchanged between George and Teddy, the undercurrent of understanding. The feeling is like running her finger along an old scar – sensitive but not painful exactly.

‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’

‘I was embarrassed. I didn’t treat her very well and we fell out. And then, of course, when what happened happened …’ He trails off.

‘And what, George? You didn’t want to be associated with a missing person? A possible suicide. Because what? It might reflect badly on you?’

George looks at her. He is pulling his honest face, one he does particularly well for the television cameras.

‘Look – our fling was ancient history by then. It wasn’t relevant. It’s not relevant now. But I know you’ve got a bee in your bonnet about this girl. And once you’d done some digging, you might have found out.’

‘So you’re telling me because I might have found out.’ Alice’s fingers curl around the paper napkin on her lap, scrunching it into a tight ball. ‘Nice one, George. That’s brilliant.’ She is angry now. ‘Was she there?’ she demands. ‘On the night of the memorial ball? With you, I mean.’

George looks completely baffled. ‘Darling, what on earth are you talking about?’

‘There’s red hair in the photograph.’ She hadn’t meant it to come out like this.

‘What?’ George rubs his forehead.

‘In that photo of you and Dan, on your desk, there’s a redhead on the edge of the photo. Was she there?’

‘No,’ says George adamantly. ‘No. God knows where she was that night. Not with us. She couldn’t stand me.’

‘Why couldn’t she stand you?’ Alice can feel the bile rising again. ‘Why?’ she demands again.

There is no stopping it this time. Alice grabs her bag and coat and heads for the door. She makes it outside just in time to throw up in a window box.

She is still holding the napkin as she walks away from the restaurant. Alice wipes her mouth and fishes around in her handbag for her mobile and a mint. She’d known, somehow, from the moment she’d seen the girl on the train that George had been involved with her. She pushes the mint to the side of her cheek with her tongue. What else had she missed? She tries to call Christie, but the answerphone picks up.

‘It’s me,’ Alice says. ‘Call me back. There’s something I need to talk to you about.’

She thinks next of Teddy, whose hand occasionally strays to her thigh under the dinner table, giving it a ‘friendly’ squeeze. He owes her a favour.

‘Al!’ He picks up immediately, sounding, as he always did, pleased with himself. ‘What’s up?’

Her voice comes out thin and formal: ‘Teddy, hi. I’ve got a bit of a weird question for you, I’m afraid.’

‘OK.’ She hears the whine of his office door being closed. ‘What is it? Everything OK? George all right?’

‘George is fine.’ She pauses, unsure how to begin. It starts to drizzle. She raises a hand above her head to protect her hair. ‘I don’t know if you remember my mentioning a girl we were at uni with the other night.’ There’s a silence. ‘Who died?’

‘Yes.’

She can hear him typing, imagines his fat fingers on the keyboard, his attention drifting already.

‘I didn’t know her very well.’

Alice takes a breath. ‘George had a fling with her, didn’t he?’

The typing stops. Teddy breathes rather heavily down the phone, not saying anything.

‘I know he did,’ Alice snaps after a moment. ‘He’s just told me.’

‘Well, then why are you asking me?’

‘What was she like?’ Alice begins to trot to the tube station.

Teddy sighs. ‘I honestly didn’t really know her,’ he says. ‘And they were barely together any time at all.’

‘You must know something?’ Alice persists.

She can hear the tapping of his fingers again.

‘She was a bit unstable,’ he says eventually. ‘I seem to remember her throwing George’s things out of the window.’

Alice shelters for a moment under a shop canopy at Chancery Lane, watching people dash through the rain. Dropped newspapers melt into the pavement.

‘Did he love her?’

‘No,’ Teddy laughs. ‘Not at all. She was way too much.’

Alice imagines Teddy checking himself out in his monitor, running a hand through his thinning hair.

‘Can I take you out for a drink, old girl? You sound as if you might need cheering up.’

‘No, you’re all right, Teddy.’ Alice rolls her eyes. ‘I’m not feeling very well. Thanks,’ she says before she hangs up, though she’s not sure what she’s grateful for.

She was way too much, she thinks. It was a strange way to describe someone. And if Ruth was too much, what was Alice? Just enough. She sighs, feeling overwhelmingly nauseous again. Hesitating for a moment, she calls the office to tell them she’ll be taking the rest of the day off. She makes an emergency afternoon appointment with her GP.

As she climbs down the steps to the tube, Alice hangs onto the banister like an old woman. She simply must have a seat on the train.

Finding her favourite place next to the door between carriages, she tilts her face towards the breeze coming through the window. The train snakes its way under London. So George had had a fling – as she suspected – with this girl. So what? Why did it matter? Because he’d lied? Again.

She’d given him an ultimatum when they had started trying for a baby. But perhaps the damage had already been done. It was like a nettle growing in her, stinging her insides. During their quieter, happier phases you could lop off the top, but never pull out the roots. The worst thing was the eternal sense of disappointment. And the slipperiness of it all: the never-knowing, the always-guessing, reading between the lines – sniffing the air, checking the sheets, watching the way he looked around a room. Constantly rubbing the clues between her fingers to see if it felt like another affair.