Close My Eyes

  I stand in the doorway, looking around at the large desk and the rows of shelves and filing cabinets. Light strikes the wooden floor in stripes. I have no idea what I’m even looking for. Immediately after the stillbirth Art took charge, making all the arrangements, signing whatever needed to be signed. I was glad at the time but, looking back, it’s like that set the tone for the years that have followed, with Art increasingly in control of who and what he wants to be and me floundering. It’s ironic that the differences that brought us together – me drawn to Art’s energy and sense of purpose, and Art attracted to my creativity and, as he saw it, unpredictability – are the very things that have driven us down parallel paths since Beth.

  The floorboards creak as I cross the office floor. They need to be re-laid – have done since we bought the house. I promised this year I would finally get around to sorting them out, but it hasn’t happened yet. Art, bless him, has never complained about this or any other of my administrative failings.

  I don’t know where to begin, so I start opening drawers at random. Art’s filing system is highly organized, but unlabelled. He has a phenomenal memory and knows – or claims to know – exactly where everything is. Apart from the cupboard in the corner, which is locked, everything is accessible, so there’s a lot to get through. I could, of course, call him again and ask where the Fair Angel info is, but he won’t understand why I want to look. Anyway, he’ll still be in his meeting, not to mention in another country.

  After a while I work out the logic to the layout. Everything to do with his personal tax affairs in one cabinet, personal investments in another, household stuff, contractors . . . I stop at a section of the cabinet that seems more haphazard than the rest. I pull out a few papers. Certificates. Licences. Diplomas.

  Half an hour later, I’ve been through every official document Art has stored here, from his childhood swimming certificate for 50 metres (‘You have now achieved Flipper level!’), through various school reports from City of London Boys – to which he won a scholarship – to his degree cert. in Economics, finding nothing relevant to Beth.

  I start again and work systematically through every single file in each of the four cabinets. There are business records going back years and letters from various financial advisers too. I flick through a sheaf of paperwork from one of Art’s old accountants . . . business loans . . . overdrafts . . . VAT . . . It’s overwhelming and largely incomprehensible.

  I come to a folder marked: ‘Personal’. Inside there’s a small sheaf of bank statements for an account I didn’t know Art had. The account covers the year after Beth died and is in the name of ‘L. B. Plus’. As far as I know, this isn’t a Loxley Benson trading name, though Dan, the finance director, has set up various business accounts for the company. But the folder says ‘personal’. I can’t stop myself from looking down the list of transactions, a slightly sick feeling in my stomach. I know Art loves me. I know he is devoted and faithful, and yet I can’t help but wonder what I might find here. The suggestions shriek inside my head: Evidence of meals in romantic restaurants? Payments to prostitutes? I tell myself not to be stupid.

  And there’s nothing that looks out of the ordinary. The running balance on the account is high – it never seems to drop below £10,000 – and there are several outgoings in the thousands: a few online payments to the wine store that Art uses for the office, deposits for business trips to the places Art regularly visits . . .

  And then I notice a lump sum . . . £50,000 paid in on 16 June eight years ago, one week after Beth died, and paid out again a few days later.

  What was that for? The payee is named as ‘MDO’. I don’t recognize the initials. I think back. Eight years ago, Loxley Benson was already well-established and generating a decent income, with hundreds of thousands of pounds going through the books every month. Art and I were planning to buy a bigger house soon after Beth was born – a plan that ended up being shelved for two years. It is entirely possible Art could have spent 50k from the business that I didn’t know about, though I can’t believe he wouldn’t have told me if the money was used for something personal.

  I flick through more bank statements, searching for additional payments to MDO. But there isn’t anything.

  I sit back on my heels, my heart thudding. Stop it, Gen, you’re being stupid, paranoid, crazy. This money could be for anything. It certainly isn’t enough to pay a doctor to fake a baby’s death.

  Another couple of hours pass and I’m exhausted. There’s info here on holidays and business trip, plus copies of both Art’s and my birth certificates. But there is nothing here on Beth or my time in the Fair Angel hospital.

  I rub my eyes. They’re sore from staring at all the fine print and my head is aching too, so I put all the files back and, after a quick look to check nothing appears too obviously disturbed, I go downstairs, get into the car and drive to M&S. I spend an hour shopping in a daze, stocking up on party snacks and mixers. I’m so preoccupied with my thoughts I almost walk out of the store with my unpaid trolley of goods, realizing my mistake just inches from the door.

  I drive home, eat several cocktail sausages and a handful of salad leaves straight from the bag, then switch off the phone and go to bed. I don’t normally nap in the daytime, but today I feel utterly exhausted. Our bedroom is a mix of our tastes. Simple, uncluttered and plain for me, with splashes of the strong, bold colours that Art loves.

  I lie under the duvet, but sleep doesn’t come. Instead, memories wash over me like the sea crashing over the shore – unstoppable.

  My dad died long ago, when I was a little girl. I don’t remember him well – just snatches out of time – but from what people tell me he and Art had a lot in common. Like Art, my dad was charming, driven and talented. And in a sense he was equally successful.

  But Art is on top of his life in a way my dad never was.

  My dad was a musician – a brilliant guitarist who played with every major seventies band from Pink Floyd to The Rolling Stones. He was away from home a lot, but when he was around he made everything a party. He would always bring me exotic presents and greet me with a huge smile and some silly song he’d made up for me. My Queen, he called me, all mock serious – or Queenie when he really wanted to tease me. He had long, dark hair that fell over his face when he played his guitar, and hands that always shook in the morning.

  I hold out my hands in front of me. Mum says they are like his – slim, with long, tapered fingers. And my mouth. That’s like his, too. Bottom lip thin, top lip full. I think Beth would have had our mouth. I wonder what Dad would have been like as a granddad.

  I close my eyes, remembering how his breath smelled sweet when he kissed me goodnight. I didn’t realize until I was older that the sweetness came from vodka. He had bottles hidden all over the house. I tried some once, when I was about six – a bottle I found under some towels in the bathroom cupboard. Just a little sip. It made me feel sick, like a liquid version of the way Mum’s hairspray smelled.

  They called me Geniver after a character in a movie they’d watched during the trip they made to India together before I was born. I can’t imagine Mum – even the young, hippyish version I know from photos – enjoying the rough freedom of India, but I loved Dad’s stories of how they wandered together through village festivals and markets, the scents of cardamom and cumin heavy in the humid air.

  Dad drank himself to death just before my ninth birthday. He was on tour – back in India, ironically – with a now long-forgotten group called Star Fire. You can hear Dad’s guitar solo on their only hit: ‘Fire in the Hole’. Apparently, the day he died, he recorded the song then argued with the band’s manager. That was the start of a ten-hour drinking session that ended with him choking to death on his own vomit in an alleyway outside a nightclub.

  They found a little salwar kameez he’d bought for me in his hotel room. I still have it.

  On an impulse I get out of bed and head for the large walk-in closet that leads off our bedroom. Art’s stuf
f takes up less than a third of the space in here. The rest is crammed with my own clothes, mostly things I no longer wear – or that no longer fit.

  I rummage along the bottom shelf, looking for the pile of old clothes I brought from Mum’s house when we moved here. I find my Brownie uniform, covered in badges, then my school tie with its blue-and-maroon stripes. The salwar kameez lies underneath. It’s red silk. I never wore it. It only fitted me for a few months after Dad died, when the idea of actually putting it on was too painful. Suppose I tore it? Or spilt something on it? I kept it pristine, a treasure, a precious memory. And then one day I went to dress up in it in front of my bedroom mirror and had grown too big for it. I wept then, thinking about Dad dying alone, missing him.

  It’s funny, I have no memory of him ever being drunk around me. Sometimes I even wonder if he was really as bad as Mum likes to say. After all, musicians are allowed a little licence. Partying goes with the territory.

  One of the things that drew me to Art was that his father wasn’t around when he was a child either. He understands what it’s like to be without a parent when you’re young and to idolize them while somehow, somewhere, thinking you must be to blame for their absence.

  I reach under the salwar kameez and take out what I know is there: a small, white babygro. It’s the only item of Beth’s baby clothing that I kept. I let Hen have everything else – it seemed only fair, she had so little money for Nathan back then.

  I take the babygro and hold it to my face. After Beth, I carried it with me everywhere for a year, I even slept with it. I packed it away the day we scattered Beth’s ashes. It’s years since I’ve seen it and, as I feel its softness against my cheek, I realize that it no longer has any power over me. It’s just a piece of cloth. Never worn, never used. That I invested it with the significance I did seems amazing to me now.

  Could Art have lied to me about Beth?

  The question ricochets around my head.

  Ridiculous. Impossible. Even if he were capable of such dishonesty, what possible reason could he have for colluding in a plot to take our child – our first and only, much-wanted baby – away from us?

  I put the babygro and the salwar kameez away, run a bath and soak in it.

  I strain my memory, trying to bring back the moment Art told me Beth was dead. We lost her. Suddenly the words sound ambiguous. Lost her to whom?

  I close my eyes, remembering how Art had cried in my arms and how I’d wept in his. How each day brought a new reminder that, although we had no baby, no one had informed my body, so that my belly sagged and ached under the long purple gash of the fresh C-section scar, while unneeded milk leaked from my nipples. Art walked every morning along the river, hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched. I saw him from my window and everything in his body spoke of his despair. He went to pieces at the funeral, too. I watched him from behind the numb wall of my own grief as his legs gave way under him and Morgan helped him stumble red-eyed out of the crematorium.

  It’s impossible to believe that anything Lucy O’Donnell said is true. And yet my gut tells me she wasn’t lying. I sink lower into the bath, letting the water lap over my stomach, over the place where Beth once danced inside me.

  I fall asleep at last in the warm water. In my dream I’m back in the house where I grew up. I’m hiding under the bed, a child, holding my dad’s guitar like a security blanket, and then a voice calls me out and it’s the young doctor from the first clinic where Art and I were tested following nine months of trying to get pregnant again after Beth. I’m not anxious about it – not really. After all, I got pregnant easily enough the first time. The doctor turns to me. She smiles. ‘We can find nothing wrong,’ she says. ‘You are both still young. It just takes time.’ She shakes my arm. ‘Listen to me. It is just a matter of time. The baby should come. Just give it time.’ She shakes my arm. ‘Geniver. Give it time. Time. Gen . . .’

  ‘Gen.’

  I wake, disoriented. Art is gently shaking my arm. It is dusk outside and I am lying on the bed covered in just a towel . . . Cold.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Art’s eyes are tender in the twilight. He sits on the bed beside me.

  I tug at the towel, drawing it up over my shoulders. I don’t even remember getting out of the bath and onto the bed. I stare into Art’s face and realize how crazy I was to let some stranger make me doubt him for a second.

  ‘You must be exhausted,’ I mumble. ‘What’s the time?’

  ‘Almost seven.’ He grimaces. ‘I didn’t have a minute all day and the flight home was packed.’ He pauses, leaning lower and letting his lips graze my forehead. ‘It’s you I’m worried about, though,’ he whispers. ‘How are you doing?’

  I stroke his face, running my finger over the lines that crease the skin around his eyes. They weren’t there a year ago. Art is getting older. And so am I. There’s nothing stronger than the bond created by time and suffering.

  ‘I’m sorry about this morning, Art, that woman really got to me.’

  ‘I know.’ Art tucks the towel around me as I shiver. ‘I put in a call to Vaizey. He wouldn’t speak to me, but I left a message.’ He pauses. ‘Bastard.’

  I raise my eyebrows.

  ‘Don’t worry, I didn’t actually threaten him, just made it clear that if he was trying to stir anything up between us, he might as well stop now. It wasn’t going to work.’

  ‘No.’ I squeeze his hand. ‘So how was your meeting?’

  ‘Good.’ Art grins. ‘Hey, d’you want to hear something amazing?’

  I sit up. ‘What?’

  ‘Two things actually.’ He laughs. ‘Count ’em. One, today’s pitch went well. Really well. The client more or less said the job was ours.’

  ‘Fantastic.’ I smile, trying to look like I know which client he’s talking about. This one has totally passed me by. All I know is that the company is based in Brussels. To be honest, since Art appeared in The Trials there have been too many pitches to keep track of.

  ‘The second amazing thing that happened today is that the woman I was with, Sandrine – she’s on a policy committee at Number Ten,’ Art pauses for breath. ‘Ten Downing Street, Gen. She’d already said she wanted to talk to me about an “initiative”, remember? Well, apparently the PM saw me on The Trials and he wants me on the same committee that she’s on. It’s not window dressing either. I got into the weeds with Sandrine about it. She says the PM is really impressed with me, wants me in the “loop”, this particular “loop” being a top-level, big-bloody-deal of a weekly session that the Prime Minister is always at. Me, him, her and three other people, max. Just think, Gen. Me and the bloody PM in a meeting together. Starting tomorrow.’ He shucks his jacket off with a flourish.

  ‘That’s brilliant,’ I say.

  ‘Bloody right.’ Art laughs. He sits back and loosens his tie. ‘And the best bit is the influence on policy I’ll have. D’you get it, Gen? They’re going to listen to me, because I’ve grown the company so much – against all the odds – and I’ve walked the line while I’ve done it. Everything ethical, sustainable . . . They see me up here on this high moral ground and they want to jump up and join me.’ He beams at me. ‘This is so much bigger than the company, than just Loxley Benson; it feels like everything’s opening up: me getting to make a difference on policy, you trying to get pregnant again . . . Hey, maybe we should celebrate, buy that recycled dance sculpture from Being Green that you liked?’

  I stare at him. ‘That cost nearly fifty grand.’

  An image of the £50,000 payment to MDO on the bank statement flashes up inside my head. My pulse races, my mind suddenly alert and working at a million miles an hour. I have to ask Art. It will drive me insane otherwise.

  Art laughs. ‘Okay then, how about an environmentally friendly barbecue?’

  ‘Actually . . .’ I try to sound casual. ‘I was looking for something earlier and I came across an odd payment. The folder was marked “personal”, but the file was an account for L. B. Plus.’

 
Art shrugs. ‘That’s probably just one of Dan’s trading names for Loxley Benson, you know he uses loads of them . . .’ He pauses. ‘What was the payment for?’

  ‘I don’t know, but it was fifty grand,’ I pause, watching his face carefully. ‘The payee’s name was MDO.’

  ‘Right.’ Art’s expression is impassive. ‘When was this?’

  ‘Nearly eight years ago. Just after . . . you know . . .’

  The atmosphere immediately grows tense. Art sucks in his breath. ‘Has this got something to do with that stupid bitch who came here this morning?’

  ‘No, of course not.’ I touch his arm, to emphasize that there’s no accusation in my question. ‘Honest, Art, it’s just made me think about that time and I realized I didn’t know where any of the old paperwork is stored and then I came across this weird account . . .’ I tail off, hoping Art can’t see through me, to the mistrustful heart of my suspicions.

  Art takes a step away from me. His face is guarded. ‘I can’t remember what that payment was for,’ he says. ‘But it probably got filed in a personal folder by accident. I’ll look into it.’

  My heart sinks at the distance that’s just opened up between us. ‘I’m sorry, Art, that woman really upset me. It’s hard when a total stranger looks you in the eyes and—’

  ‘And makes an outrageous accusation against your own husband that you can’t be one hundred percent sure isn’t true?’ Art’s voice is carefully light, but I can hear the tension underneath.

  ‘No.’ I smile. ‘I know it’s not true. It’s just . . .’ My voice shrinks to a whisper. ‘It’s just . . . our baby . . . I never saw her, Art. Suppose . . .’

  He stares at me. ‘Yes, but God, Gen.’ His voice is gentler than before. He squats down beside me and reaches across the bed for my hand. ‘You know why you didn’t, but I saw her.’