The Book of You. Claire Kendal

That was my description,’ Miss Lockyer said.

      There was no way that description matched. Could Clarissa herself make such a mistake, if she were in too much fear to look? Or had the police got the wrong man?

      Tomlinson’s barrister looked like a seasoned Shakespearean actor. ‘Mr Tomlinson had consensual sex with you. It was not the violent encounter you portrayed. It was a cold-blooded commercial transaction for drugs. You are a professional, Miss Lockyer. You even gave Mr Tomlinson a condom.’

      Clarissa shuddered. She hadn’t been able to remember enough of that November night to know if Rafe had worn a condom. Knowing him, he probably hadn’t. She’d been inexpressibly relieved when her period had started a week later, as expected: a novel experience for her to wish not to be pregnant. What would Mr Belford make of her, if she were sitting in that witness chair?

      Clarissa spoke quietly to Annie as they got their coats and slowly made their way out of the building. ‘That’s what happens when you press charges, when you complain. They just rape you up there all over again and say you’re a prostitute.’

      ‘But she was a prostitute, Clarissa,’ Annie said. ‘Nobody could possibly believe her when she says she wasn’t.’

      Clarissa stuffed her tattered copy of Keats’s Collected Poems into her bag. The book was a relic of her abandoned PhD, and something she always reached for when the world around her seemed especially dark and uncivilised. She glanced out the train window. Robert strode assuredly along the platform and disappeared down the stairs. She hadn’t realised he’d been on the train; it hadn’t occurred to her that he might live in Bath too. Somehow he’d climbed off and got himself almost out of the station before the other passengers had even begun to alight.

      She surveyed the platform for Rafe, peering into the crowd that was pressing her towards the stairs. Her body was aching from sitting all day. She wanted fresh air. She wanted to move. She’d already had to give up her morning walks. She didn’t want to lose the walk home, too. The fact that the taxi-queue was so impossibly long helped her to make up her mind, but she was glad there were so many people about.

      Still, she was nervous when she stepped into the railway arch behind the station. She paused to look inside the tunnel: no Rafe. And on the bridge, before she stepped onto it to cross the river: again he wasn’t there.

      But there was someone, in the middle of the bridge, crumpled inside a heap of shabby blankets and encircled by empty beer cans, clutching a bottle of cheap spirits. There were several plastic bags around her, with her meagre belongings.

      Normally, Clarissa would keep as much distance between them as she could. This time, she approached the woman, though she fought a stab of the same mixture of fear and pity that Miss Lockyer made her feel. She gripped her bag more tightly.

      The woman’s hair was so greasy and matted Clarissa couldn’t tell what colour it was. Her flimsy shell jacket was torn and filthy on her skeleton frame. Her wrinkled skin was so rough and red and flaky it must have hurt; she appeared at first glance to be an old woman, but probably wasn’t more than forty. Would this be Miss Lockyer, some day? There was a stench of sour flesh – an unmistakable mix of unwashed genitals and anus and armpit sweat – that made Clarissa gag and try to breathe through her mouth, hoping the woman didn’t notice.

      ‘Money for the shelter?’ The woman held out a hand that was almost blue with cold. Clarissa took off a mitten and drew out a twenty-pound note, knowing it would probably be used to purchase a wrap of crack cocaine and a wrap of heroin. ‘Bless you,’ the woman said.

      Clarissa peeled off her other mitten and offered the pair, uncertain if her mother’s knitting would be wanted. The woman hesitated, then took them and put them on, slowly and clumsily. ‘Bless you,’ she said again, not meeting Clarissa’s eye, and Clarissa moved forward, pressing her now frozen fists deeply into the pockets of the warm coat she’d cut out when Henry had still been there.

      Henry, smiling faintly then, a glass of wine and the paper in his hands as she kneeled on the living-room floor, bending over the indigo wool she’d quilted into diamonds, immersed in her plans for it. Henry, crackling with energy even when he was still. Henry, shaving the few hairs he had left in the shower each morning, so he was entirely bald – a style choice rather than unwanted fate, and yet more evidence of his infallible aesthetic judgement. Henry, in Cambridge now, a world away from this woman and from Clarissa.

      Clarissa hurried on, wanting to get home as fast as she could. She reached the old churchyard within minutes. Miss Lockyer must have passed it countless times, including the day they took her. Had she ever noticed the only tomb that hadn’t been torn out? Green with mildew, the grey stone box marking the location of the bodies was the size of a large trunk. Many centuries ago the graveyard had been a wood. It was another of Clarissa’s special places. She liked to think it was a source of magic for her, and that someday that magic would take effect, though it hadn’t happened yet.

      A woman had been buried there with her two babies in the middle of the nineteenth century. Three deaths in two years. Clarissa couldn’t see the inscriptions in the dark and the engraved letters were losing their definition, but she knew them by heart.

       Matilda Bourn, Died 21st August 1850, Aged 4 Months

       Louisa Bourn, Died 16th September 1851, Aged 6 Weeks

       Jane Bourn, Mother of the Above Children

       Died 22nd December 1852, Aged 43 Years & 6 Months

      Clarissa always imagined the two babies cradled in their mother’s arms, beneath that damp earth, and the mother happy at last to be able to hold them to her. Had they been her only babies? Probably there’d been many others; that was more likely. Probably her health had been ruined by too many pregnancies too close together – that might have been what killed her. Clarissa could have researched it, but she didn’t really want to know. She preferred the story she told herself, in which the woman waited and yearned, childless, for a long time. Then, miraculously, she had her babies after she turned forty, the age Clarissa would be in a year and a half. Only to lose them.

      No husband was mentioned. No father. As if the only relationship that mattered was the one between the dead mother and her dead babies. But somebody had valued them enough to put up that stone.

      Clarissa’s surname was a variant of theirs, but she knew that that wasn’t why she felt such a powerful connection to the dead mother and her dead babies. She had an almost superstitious ritual of praying for them – and to them – whenever she passed the grave. Sometimes she climbed over the iron gate at the far end to clear away crumpled cans or greasy fast-food wrappings.

      Tonight, it was pitch-black there. The people who’d seemed to share her walk home from the train station had somehow melted away without her noticing; she’d loitered too long with the woman on the bridge. Regretting her decision to give up on the taxi-queue, she considered doubling back. But she quickly calculated that wouldn’t help matters – she’d be as alone and isolated retracing her steps as she’d be pressing on.

      She tried to reason with herself that Rafe knew nothing about her daily trips to Bristol; he had no reason to suspect she’d be walking home from the station in the evenings. Nonetheless, she couldn’t help but imagine shadows moving along the walls, where they’d leaned all the old gravestones; those who’d wept over them were long dead; they’d probably never imagined that the carefully wrought markers would be ripped from their places.

      She plunged ahead, only just holding herself back from running in case she slipped on the icy footpath. She was certain he would suddenly step into her line of sight, materialising out of the starless night.

      She only began to breathe freely when she reached her street. She wouldn’t walk any more on her own after daylight. Not anywhere. No matter how long she had to wait for a taxi. And when she did walk, she would only go to places that were dependably teeming with people.