‘How old are you?’ she asked bluntly.
‘I’m twenty-one next month,’ I said. ‘I married young.’
Catherine was alive with shock now; I could feel it buzzing, crackling off her. ‘That’s amazing!’ she shrieked, reaching out and grabbing my hand hotly in hers. ‘I can’t believe I’ve been working with you all this time, and I never even knew you were married! God, I don’t know anyone who’s even in a serious relationship, let alone…it’s so romantic.’ All of a sudden she looked down, as if her hand were telling her something. She examined mine, turned it over. ‘You don’t wear a ring?’ she asked. For a second her face dropped with disappointed suspicion.
‘I do,’ I said quickly, hating her doubting me. ‘I just wear it around my neck, see?’ I fumbled for the long, thin white gold chain beneath my shirt and drew it out. The platinum-and-diamond ring sparkled wickedly in the light, swaying back and forth like a dowser’s pendulum beneath my hand.
‘I see,’ said Catherine slowly, reaching out a finger to touch it. ‘Why do you do that?’
I drew in breath to speak, and found that this was harder. I fought past the sudden sickness in my throat: I had come this far. ‘Jonathan died last October,’ I said. ‘I didn’t want to get rid of the ring, but it feels wrong to wear it on my wedding finger now. I don’t know why.’
She leant in towards me, her hands clasped tightly together now as if she were praying. Her face was flooded with sympathy. ‘Oh my God.’ She was looking at me as if I were someone entirely different from the girl she had thought she had known – a curiosity, a rare discovery to be treasured and explored.
‘You’re the first person I’ve spoken to about it.’ I corrected myself. ‘The first person who didn’t already know.’
Catherine bowed her head, as if sensible of the honour, simultaneously gratified and unworthy. When she shook her head in disbelief, her long beaded glass earrings leapt and jangled prettily against her neck, casting pale shadows against her skin. For a few moments, stupidly, I couldn’t tear my eyes away from them. I felt the hairs on my arms stand on end and prickle against my sleeves; despite the heat of the day, I was cold, and shivering with what felt like delayed shock. Now that I had told her, the glee had drained out of me. I wanted the words back, wanted them swallowed back up into the black depths of my head.
I heard her voice, tentative but insistent, come to me from somewhere. ‘How did it happen?’
‘It was an accident,’ I said, and in the same instant heard the bell go. A group of young girls poured into the shop, chatting and screaming with laughter. Catherine looked swiftly across at them, then back at me, frozen into silence. Excuse me, excuse me, one of the girls was bleating, holding up a skirt, do you have this in a size ten? She means a twelve, another cut in. Whoops of laughter. You cheeky cow. Oh, come on – you’re never a ten. Their words rolled around the walls like marbles. I watched Catherine rise reluctantly from her seat and move towards them. I could still feel my pulse beating hard and fast, thumping in my eardrums. I slipped the chain back inside my shirt. For the rest of the shift, I could feel the cool, perfect circle of the ring against my skin, always there, reminding me, branding me.
We stay away from the office for the next two days, holed up together in Jonathan’s penthouse flat, leaving only to buy food, which we eat mostly in bed. On Friday morning he sleeps in until twelve, and I spend over an hour just lying there looking at him. His lips are slightly parted, showing a flash of white pointed teeth that gives me a sick, shifting pang of lust deep inside my stomach. His eyes move mysteriously under closed lids, rolling and flickering. I want to peel them back and step into his dreams.
When he wakes he reaches for me reflexively. ‘Good morning,’ he murmurs.
‘Good morning,’ I repeat. He must catch something different in my voice, because he sits up sharply.
‘What’s up?’ he says. ‘Are you hungry? Do you want me to get you something to eat?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘It’s just…I’ll have to go soon.’
Jonathan shakes his head, more in confusion than disagreement, as if he simply cannot believe what he is hearing. ‘Go where?’ he asks. ‘What for?’
I spread my hands helplessly. ‘I’m going to Manchester tomorrow,’ I say. ‘To start university. You know that.’
He frowns a little, lines creasing the smooth beauty of his forehead. ‘You can’t do that,’ he says. When I don’t reply, he repeats it, louder this time. ‘You can’t do that. You’ll have to cancel.’
Even though I can hardly bear the thought of leaving him, a laugh rises unwillingly in my throat. ‘You can’t just cancel university. I have to go.’
‘No,’ he says, grabbing my hand, pulling me against him. We are so close that I can’t even focus on him any more, but I can still feel his eyes boring through me. ‘You have to stay. Here with me. If you go to Manchester, it’s over.’
His words land like a punch and I gasp. This conversation is moving too fast, making me dizzy. If I’ve thought about it at all in the haze of the past two days, I have vaguely assumed that we will manage, no matter how far apart we are; visits at weekends, long stretches of time together in the holidays. I love him, and although he hasn’t yet said so, I know he loves me too. This is what love is about: enduring separation, believing that we can surmount all obstacles. I tell him as much, but he thumps his hand impatiently down on the bed, making me flinch.
‘No, Violet,’ he barks. His face is aflame with anger and outrage. ‘Love is about being together. I want you, and it’s now or it’s not at all – I won’t wait for you.’ It should sound hard and unfeeling, but somehow it doesn’t. It sounds like exactly what I’ve dreamt of hearing all my life. Someone who needs me, who’s desperate for me, so desperate that he can’t even bear me to be out of his sight.
‘I can’t,’ I say again, but the conviction has gone from my voice.
He leaps up and pulls on a robe; grabbing the phone from the bedside table, he strides back and brandishes it in front of me. ‘Of course you can,’ he says. ‘You can call them right now and tell them you’re not coming.’ Suddenly, he smiles wickedly, and the warmth of it soaks right through my skin to my bones. As I take the phone I’m laughing and shaking my head, because it’s all so ridiculous, because the truth of it is that I barely know him, because it would be crazy to throw the future I’ve planned for months away with one phone call, and because I know that this is it, suddenly there’s no other option – he’s the one and I’m going to do it.
The woman at the admissions office on the other end of the line is silent for a long while, and then asks to speak to my parents. My mouth opens and words fall out: I tell her she can’t, because they are both dead. I have not crafted my thoughts or moulded them into speech – they have just happened to me, used me as a vessel. As the woman flounders and gropes for a response, I press the button and cut her off. I’m laughing like a madwoman as I jump into Jonathan’s arms. He hugs me back, but I can feel the tension in his shoulders. Sure enough, after a few seconds he grips me by my arms and pushes me back slightly, frowning at me.
‘Was that true?’ he asks.
‘No,’ I say, even though an inner voice is telling me to stick to my story. To do otherwise looks crazy, unreliable, but I can’t help myself. Anyone else I can lie to, I think, but not you, not you.
He tips his head back sharply for an instant, as if to throw his thoughts together into a heap. ‘Why did you say it, then?’ he asks. I can’t know, at this point, that denying his parents’ existence would seem to him the worst kind of sacrilege.
I