Elaine Bedell - About That Night

‘So it was a heart attack?’

She thought again of Ricky’s bloodshot eyes and violently contorting body. Was that what had happened to her dear dad? A half moan escaped her. ‘I guess it must have been. Oh God, Hutch, I don’t even know how old he was! I mean, officially.’

‘He was fifty-two.’ His voice was flat, certain. He seemed unaware of her distress. ‘He’s exactly ten years older than me. We’re both Aries. And that’s where the similarities end.’ She could hear him yawning. ‘Or should I say, ended.’

‘Hutch! Please.’ Elizabeth refrained from saying that a cruel wit was at least one other striking similarity between the two of them. She was struck by the fact that he was yawning, stretching, drinking coffee – as if waking up to a normal day. All the ordinary morning things she’d never seen him do. ‘Hutch, Ricky knew about the pilot! He knew we were trying out a new show with you. I was so worried about him finding out – but he already knew. So it’s even more extraordinary that he should be so fine in the studio yesterday.’

‘Really? Who told him?’ Hutch’s voice had a sudden sharpness, a hack’s nose for a source.

‘Well, Matthew did actually. The day before, at lunch, apparently.’

‘Did he indeed! That’s interesting.’ There was a pause.

‘You didn’t call or text last night.’ Elizabeth gazed at Hutch’s jumper on her bedroom chair.

‘Yeah. Sorry. I was at the match and then went out to dinner with Sue.’ Her name hung in the air. Like a stale smell.

‘Oh.’ And behind that ‘oh’ was an entire avalanche of suppressed emotions: hurt, dismay, jealousy. Resignation.

‘Are you around later? Can I buy you lunch? After you’ve been to the police station?’

Elizabeth paused, but her heart began to beat faster. She desperately wanted some arms around her. She wanted someone to be there for her. But she tried to sound as casual as he did. ‘Yes, I think I can do that. Usual place?’

‘Yes. Usual place. One o’clock. Oh, and Elizabeth? Don’t confess. Even if they waterboard you.’

Elizabeth couldn’t help herself, she smiled. He still had the ability to do that, despite everything, to make her laugh.

‘Fuck off, Hutch.’

Elizabeth took the bus to Paddington Green Police Station. She liked the unusual sensation of sitting up top on a bus and watching London crawl beneath her. She had a car, a Volkswagen Beetle Convertible, which she drove furiously and much too fast. (She once drove Hutch down the Embankment and around Parliament Square and afterwards he said he needed a brandy and a lie-down.) But in the trauma of last night she’d left it parked at the production offices, where it was currently acquiring the undesirable accessory of a sticky plastic parking ticket. It was Elizabeth’s fourth ticket in six weeks and on each occasion she’d made up her mind that she would renew her acquaintance with Transport for London. Her family had strong links with public transport: one grandad had been a linesman on the railways, the other a bus conductor, all his life on the same route – the 38. As Elizabeth’s nan had said rather bitterly after he died, ‘Never got promoted. Never got to do the 176 or the 55. Never got to go up Park Lane, or down Piccadilly. Never got to be a driver, neither. Always the same bloody route. Every day of his life.’ But her grandad hadn’t sought promotion, he’d been perfectly happy with his lot. And Elizabeth thought there was much to be said for being happy with your lot. You never know when it might all disappear.

As the 73 chugged and chewed its way down Euston Road and through the early morning rush hour, it shaved some overhanging horse chestnut trees, showering the roof with pale white blooms that fluttered down past the window like the ghostly remains of a bridal bouquet. Hutch once took her for the night to one of those five-star hotels that turns your towels into origami animals and scatters petals across the bed (the bed was the size of a small continent) and in the middle of the night, Elizabeth found pale pink petals stuck between her thighs and in her armpits. Later, in the waterfall shower, she found another one between Hutch’s buttocks. It was there that Hutch first told her he loved her and promised that he would leave his wife.

And in turn, she had finally told him about Jamie, and about the wedding that wasn’t.

Her wedding day turned out to be a perfect pink Magnolia May morning, just as she’d imagined it would be. It had been just four weeks since Jamie’s surprise proposal. They’d decided there was no point in waiting – after all, they’d waited ten years. Jamie didn’t want the full pomp and ceremony of a church wedding and thought it a waste of money, and Elizabeth had convinced herself they were just getting the right piece of paper before having children. So she’d approached the production of her rushed wedding as if it was a last-minute live television programme. She came up with a strictly limited guest list, she wrote out a running order and she had an Excel spreadsheet on which she eked out their wedding budget. Their honeymoon was to be a two-day mini break in a Cotswolds spa hotel. She would be back in the office on Friday. They bought her a wedding ring in Hatton Garden for £35 and every so often she took it out of the little blue velvet box and tried it on her finger. She’d never worn rings and the wedding band felt tight and restrictive. She couldn’t stop staring at it.

On the way to the register office, sitting with her mum Maureen and her sister Vic in the back of a London black cab clutching a hand-tied bunch of daffodils and irises (Vic had insisted she take something blue), Elizabeth realised she hadn’t heard from Jamie since the previous afternoon. They’d spent the night before their wedding apart and she’d assumed he was just sticking to tradition. In the end, she’d texted him a jokey photo of a bride in an enormous meringue dress with a smiley emoji. But he hadn’t replied. They’d gone for more than twenty-four hours without speaking and she couldn’t remember a time in the last ten years when they had done that.

She was wearing the vintage lace garter Vic had laughingly given her the night before (something old) and it was chafing the soft skin on her inner thigh. Elizabeth had scratched it irritably several times already and now as she surreptitiously lifted the hem of her dress, she saw that the flesh around the garter was red and angry. Her dress was a vintage 1960s sleeveless shift and was the colour of apricots. She thought it would be a statement dress – look at me, I’m in a fun, flirty, fruity frock – but now she regretted it. The dress was creasing terribly in the traffic jam on the Euston Road. The plastic comb of flowers she’d tried to weave through her hair wouldn’t stay in place and was now hanging drunkenly by a thread around her ear. The daffodils started to droop. She noticed her left hand (no engagement ring) was resting on the cab door handle and that she’d clenched it tight, as if about to open the door.

‘What are you doing?’ her sister asked sharply and Elizabeth’s hand dropped, lamely, back to her lap. Vic had got married in a country church wearing a long cream silk dress that melted over her curves like liquid silver. She’d looked stunning. ‘Won’t be long now.’ Her sister had smiled brightly at her, as Elizabeth imagined Vic must smile at her clients before she led them into the dock to be sentenced. Of course they should have known the traffic would be terrible, it was a Wednesday afternoon. A woeful workday Wednesday. Who gets married on a Wednesday? Vic’s face softened when she saw Elizabeth’s brimming eyes.

‘Mum, tell you what. You keep the taxi. We’ll walk. I feel a bit sick and could do with some fresh air and it would be good for Elizabeth to get a quick breather.’ Vic was all lawyerly efficiency. She was wearing a smart navy blue coat dress. (‘It’ll always do for court afterwards,’ she had told Elizabeth on the phone after she’d bought it. At the time, Elizabeth had felt hurt, as if her wedding wasn’t excuse enough for her sister to buy a new shocking pink dress, but now she couldn’t help thinking how wise it was.) Vic had inherited their mum’s fairer skin and hair – although she’d dyed it so many times during her flirtation with the post-punk revival that Elizabeth could barely remember its original shade – and she had it cut short and pixie-like, a style that served her even better now, when she was almost in her forties and the mother of two small children, than when she’d flirted with The Libertines.