The Girl Before You. Nicola Rayner

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.

      There had been a few dalliances, as he’d put it, when he first moved to London and she was in St Anthony’s. Alice had got her head around those – just about – and retaliated with an unsatisfactory dalliance or two of her own. Much more painful had been the affair he’d had with a family friend in Witney when he was spending a lot of time there as an MP. After visiting one weekend, Alice had found a scrunchie in the bed of their cottage. There had been a terrible scene. His mother had got involved, leaping to George’s defence, of course. ‘What do you expect him to do if you’re in London working all the time?’ she’d said accusingly. ‘And it’s not as if you have children.’

      Her words stayed with Alice. It was as close as his mother had got to direct hostility, but there had been an undercurrent of disapproval as long as she could remember. When the affair ended around four years ago, she and George started trying for a baby, but she couldn’t conceive. There was some talk of IVF after a couple of years, but then there had been a new case for her, a new project for him. There had always seemed to be something more pressing to focus on first and now her body was changing, her cycles were becoming longer. Her mother had had an early menopause, too. It seemed that their chance had passed.

      The train fills up fairly quickly as it travels west. By Oxford Street, Alice is boxed in by bodies. It’s stuffy in the packed carriage. Even the air whistling in through the carriage-door window smells stale. The acidity of the vomit burns her throat. Alice swallows, leans her head against the glass partition and looks through the door at the people clustered in the next carriage. One of them is wearing a green dress Alice recognises – she has the same one. It’s made of wool with a high neck: she must be sweltering. Alice’s gaze ascends the woman’s body, up to her hairline. Her hair is swept up in a wide cream scarf, but the strands escaping it are, Alice can see, bright red.

      She swallows again, closes her eyes and opens them. Her eyeballs are dry and tired. She pushes herself up a little from her seat, straining to see just a fraction of the woman’s face, but it is turned into the crowd. You’re being ridiculous, she tells herself. Are you going to do this every time you see a woman with red hair?

      As the tube begins to slow as it reaches Bond Street, Alice sees the redhead push towards the door. If she could just check, just see her face, then she would know. She gets up from her seat, stepping over bags, nudging past people. ‘Excuse me,’ she mutters, swinging her arms out to steady herself. A woman in a too-tight navy skirt sighs at her loudly.

      The blurred faces waiting on the platform come into focus. There’s a wall of them outside. Alice fights through in the direction of the next carriage, but there is no sign of the woman she saw. She pushes faster through the crowd, but it is difficult against the tide of passengers getting on the train. Can she see red hair falling from a cream scarf? Is that a green dress vanishing into the distance?

       Kat

      Everybody knows what goes on in the first-floor loos during college parties. Still, Kat’s heart sinks as she hears the unmistakable sound of two bodies shuffling into the cubicle next to her. In the right kind of mood, she might get a kick out of it, but she’s feeling flat tonight. The twinges of pain in her abdomen had returned just as she and Ruth had arrived at the party and bumped into Richard. And even though Kat was wearing what she thought of as her Jessica Rabbit dress, with a slit in the fabric so high it almost reached her knickers – a poor choice, in hindsight – he had barely registered her.

      ‘Who was he?’ Ruth asked afterwards. ‘He seemed nice.’

      ‘Richard Wiseman,’ Kat said shortly. ‘And he is.’ She’d thought of adding, He likes you, but then George, who had wheedled his way back into Ruth’s favour, had bounded over and grabbed Ruth by the waist, and the evening had gone in a different direction. Kat wondered briefly if Richard’s lack of interest had anything to do with the couple of one-night stands she’d had since she’d last seen him. Her most recent conquest, a skinny guitarist she’d met at the union, had been insatiable.

      ‘You’re really something,’ he said, but a week later all that remained of him was a touch of this cystitis, making her dash for the loo and then just sit there in agony while nothing came out.

      They’re making a hell of a racket next door. It sounds as if he’s carrying her into the cubicle like some chivalric knight, then drops her so she