The Girl Before You. Nicola Rayner

movement in the cluster around the drinks table, a gasp and, as if in slow motion, a glass of red wine slices through the air towards the girl’s white dress. There’s a shriek and the guy who has spilt the drink is moving towards her, all apologies and hands, trying to dab at the jagged stain with his handkerchief.

      ‘Oldest trick in the book,’ Jerry breathes next to her, looking towards the student with the handkerchief: a sturdy-looking chap with aquiline features and an air of unshakable confidence.

      ‘What?’

      ‘George Bell,’ says Jerry. As if that explained something in itself. ‘He’ll be saying, “Let’s get you out of those wet clothes.” Something like that.’

      ‘Right.’ Kat makes out the back of Richard’s head in the shifting crowd.

      ‘Classic George.’ Jerry smirks. ‘He’ll always pick the most beautiful girl in the room and do that sort of thing.’

      Kat blinks, pushes a strand of hair behind her ear.

      What is Richard doing in all this kerfuffle, as George passes the redhead a cloth, as he pours her another drink, as he lifts his hand, briefly, to wipe away a few drops, real or imagined, from the girl’s hair? There he is. Kat catches a glimpse of Richard’s face, pale and grimacing, as he turns back towards them.

      ‘What happened there?’ she asks.

      ‘George happened,’ he says in a low voice so Jerry won’t be able to hear. He looks into his drink.

      Kat can catch the odd word of George’s plummy voice across the room. ‘Who’s he?’

      ‘He is’—Richard pauses for a moment as if to find the correct phrase—‘an unspeakable cunt.’

      Kat, usually unshockable, blinks at the word. ‘Why?’ she wants to say.

      She looks at the girl again, who glances over at them. She narrows her eyes slightly as if in recognition of something. Kat smiles tightly and wonders if Richard has noticed.

      The moment passes. The girl seems to be getting ready to go somewhere with George. She picks up her bag and turns her face towards him to say something as they leave. Kat can’t hear what she says, but George laughs heartily and presses a casual hand into the small of her back.

      Then, Kat would think later, if things had gone otherwise that night, that moment, everything might have been different. But, instead, she takes another sip of warm white wine and sees, from the corner of her eye, George’s group sashay out of the party, the outline of a white dress as they move away.

      And though it should be a relief, though things should brighten, shift, now her rival has gone, that is not the case. She just can’t win Richard’s attention back, nor recapture the magic of the other night and all her usual tricks – a way of telling an anecdote, her hand on his arm, a certain sideways smile – fail to pique a reaction. Or maybe it’s her. It seems to Kat there’s a heaviness to everything she does tonight – the stories aren’t coming out right. The rhythm of how she tells them is wrong. Or the intonation. She can’t tell. But Richard and Jerry’s smiles are polite more than anything. Jerry’s glance darts around the room, while Richard keeps looking at the door. And even Kat’s thoughts drift to the girl in the white dress, the way she walked across the room like a dancer, the way she had caught Kat’s eye before she left.

      Some girls had things easy, but Kat had always had to try. To be entertaining: that was the most important thing; that was something she’d learned from Dorothy Parker. And if nights like this made you feel sad and defeated, then you went to bed and woke up the next day and, generally, in Kat’s experience, the darkness would have shifted.

      Eventually, Richard finishes his drink and slips away saying something about the library.

      When it’s just the two of them, Jerry perks up. He moves closer to her when she speaks. His polite smiles become forced laughter. Occasionally he touches her, on the shoulder, her waist, as if testing something.

      ‘Where did Richard go again?’ Kat asks, anticipating another touch, stepping away, leaving his hand hanging for a moment in the space between them.

      Jerry rolls his eyes. ‘I wouldn’t bother with Richard, if I were you,’ he says. ‘When he likes someone, that’s it.’

      Kat looks down at the art deco cigarette case in her hand, her remaining cigarettes lined up like soldiers. It was a present from her father for her eighteenth birthday last year, but she suspects his latest wife, his third now, only seven years older than Kat, might have had something to do with it. Should she bother with another cigarette or not? The feeling of light-headedness is back.

      ‘That’s it,’ says Jerry again. ‘Richard won’t be swayed from his course.’

      The engraving inside, though, that must have been her father: ‘Faute De Mieux’ by Dorothy Parker. He was a huge fan, too – sometimes it was the only thing that Kat could be really sure they shared.

      ‘It’s funny,’ she says, snapping the case shut. ‘I’m just the same.’

       Alice

      Standing in George’s study, Alice enjoys the quiet order of the room for a moment. She has no idea if he guesses that she comes in here when she’s alone in the house. It’s one of the things they never talk about. She’s always careful to leave it as she found it. She pops in sometimes as if she’s looking for something, though she is not sure what. She’ll wander around, picking up the odd book or trinket – a fountain pen, an ornament – and wonder where they came from. When they moved into the house, so much just arrived from George’s parents and if she ever asks, George just shrugs and says, ‘That old thing? My ma would know.’ It’s a source of irritation to Alice, who would have liked to fill her home with cleaner contemporary pieces, rather than so much creaking dark wood that he seems to care for so little himself.

      His study is one of the tidiest rooms in the house. It’s at the front of the building overlooking the street, though the shutters keep out the light. Political biographies and history books line the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, as well as the odd spy thriller. Alice runs her finger along the spines. Quite a few of them are from his days in St Anthony’s. For such an unsentimental person, George doesn’t like to throw much away.

      She settles in the dark leather armchair by the fireplace and switches on her laptop. First, she does an image search for ‘Ruth Walker’ but, though her screen is filled with lines and lines of Ruth Walkers, of all ages and sizes, in gym kits and business suits, grinning in Facebook photos or pouting on Instagram, Alice’s Ruth Walker isn’t there. Nor are there photos of her in any of the articles Alice can find. The first story to come up is an old one from a local paper in the Free Library under the headline ‘Tragedy strikes in St Anthony’s’.

      The dress of St Anthony’s student Ruth Walker has been found on South Beach this morning after a three-day police search. Ruth was last seen swimming on 23 June in the early morning after the university’s memorial ball. Walker’s family fear the worst …

      Alice blinks. She remembers the day after the ball. Waking up to a terrible hangover and the pouring rain, all the bunting and balloons of the night before mashed up into the mud, to say nothing of empty bottles, plastic glasses, cigarette butts strewn throughout college. Cleaners scowling through cagoules, grim-faced porters trying to organise the students while their parents arrived in four-by-fours to pick up their children. And by afternoon, murmurs about the news – had anyone heard? Did anyone know any more? The pulsing blue light of the police cars outside. A different world from the night before with its clowns and fairy lights and the treacly wall of heat in the quad as she had wandered through it hand in hand with George. Sitting on his lap as they watched some stand-up comedy, tutting as he and Dan heckled. And later dancing with her friends, spinning so her dress flew out around her, thinking in that moment she would never feel so carefree.

      Alice gives herself