Page 63 of Seven Reasons to Murder Your Dinner Guests
“I won’t let you do this. I can’t, Tristan. I can’t bear hearing you talk like that. You’re a beautiful, intelligent, kind person. You have so much to give. This world needs people like you.Ineed you.”
She’s crying. Tristan’s heart gives an involuntary twinge, buthe forces himself to turn away and focus his attention back on the river. He must concentrate.
“What’s got into you? I thought things were going better, Tristan.” Her hand is on his arm, those long fingers curling around his wrist, just above her father’s watch. She’s surprisingly strong, he thinks, but not strong enough.
“That’s just what you wanted to believe. The truth is, it’ll never get better. Not for me.”
“Listen, come back over here and let’s go and get a coffee somewhere. We need to talk this through properly,” she says, and he hears the fear in her voice.
“I’m so sorry,” he says, tears now falling down his own cheeks.
“You have nothing to apologize for…”
Tristan swings his body around to face her, stumbles, grabs at her elbows, and pulls her over the barrier with him as he plummets off the edge.
He stares into her shocked eyes as they fall together. He hopes they will lose consciousness before they hit the water. His ears are filled with Vivienne’s terrified screams, and then he feels pain shooting through his feet. Cold envelops them as the Thames opens its icy arms to welcome them inside. And then nothing. Blissful nothing.
The Funeral
May 2019
Six months later
Vivienne
Opening her eyes, Vivienne gasps when she sees Tristan standing in the corner of her bedroom, leaning lazily against her wardrobe.Deep breath, deep breath.Blinking several times, she scoops up her glasses from the bedside table, puts them on, and looks again. It’s just her old blue cardigan, draped haphazardly over the wardrobe door. Tristan is gone, she reminds herself.He’s gone. And yet she sees him all the time, feels him sitting on her floral duvet; her dreams are filled with him. Standing in the rain when they met for the first time, sobbing into his hands when he spoke of his panic attacks, and looking into her eyes as they dropped together into the water.
Sleep overcomes Vivienne once again, and she allows herself to be tossed around by her dreams. Now she’s stroking her ownpregnant belly. Now she’s shoulder to shoulder, laughing, with Melvin. Now she’s feeling Tristan’s hands squeeze her elbows on the bridge…
“Are you awake, Vivienne?” Cat whispers, her head peeping around the bedroom door.
“Yes, just about,” she croaks and then smiles as Cat walks in with baby Angharad on her hip and a cup of tea in her other hand.
“Drink this, and then we should start to get ready. Ziggy’s coming to pick up Angharad at nine,” Cat says, sitting on the bed and handing the baby over to Vivienne. “If you’re sure you’re up to it.”
“I am. A cuddle with this one, and I’m ready for anything,” says Vivienne, with a confidence she does not feel.
“Did you sleep much?”
“A little bit,” she says, bouncing the baby on her knee, who giggles with delight. “Still having those dreams, but the doctor said that’s normal.”
Cat nods and smiles distractedly at them. Vivienne takes in the dark circles under her eyes, the look of worry that hasn’t left her face in the last six months. She hates that she put Cat through all of that when she was heavily pregnant. Vivienne can’t remember much at all from that night. She remembers holding on to Tristan on the bridge. But that’s it. Cat has since told her that someone walking along the embankment had seen them go under and alerted the Thames Coastguard. Vivienne was found quickly and rushed to St. Thomas’s Hospital, where she was treated for brain hypoxia and pneumonia. That week in the hospital passedin a haze of delirium: lucid dreams and brief moments of wakefulness slugging it out, with dreams usually emerging victorious. When she was finally awake long enough for a conversation, Cat informed her that the coastguard hadn’t found Tristan that night, but they’d seen him struggle and slip beneath the water.
“The doctor said you might suffer memory loss, but can you remember anything about what happened?” Cat asked.
“Tristan had a panic attack and wanted to jump off the bridge… I tried to stop him…” Then Vivienne turned her head away from Cat and pretended to fall asleep. It was only once Cat’s visit had ended that she let the tears come. Tristan was gone, and she’d failed to save him.
Toward the end of her hospital stay, a woman appeared by Vivienne’s bed.
“Your doctor has suggested that you experienced a dissociative fugue state on the bridge,” she carefully explained, her fingers playing with the wooden beads around her neck. “As if you traveled out of your body for a while. I wondered if this was something you’d experienced before in moments of extreme stress?”
Vivienne’s heart hammered against her chest:Mur-der-er… Mur-der-er… No!She might have suffered a fugue state afterward, but she remembered what had happened with Tristan that night. She’d tried to save him. So she shook her head and reassured the woman that it had been a one-off, unwilling to go into all that. Once the woman left, Vivienne’s mind drifted back to her very first fugue state, when she was aged eighteen and had just given birth.
Cat takes Angharad off her, and Vivienne sips her sugary tea,still feeling an ache in her elbows where Tristan had gripped her all those months ago. If only she’d been strong enough to save him. Six months after they’d gone into the water, Tristan’s death certificate was issued and his mother, Susan, set the date for his funeral.
“You don’t have to go, you know, if it’s going to be too hard,” Cat says, tears already rising in her eyes. “Ole waterworks,” as Vivienne sometimes still calls her—once critically, now affectionately. Back at the magazine, she’d seen Cat’s regular tears as a weakness, as a means to show her (male) colleagues she couldn’t cope, a signal that she was bowing down to their superiority. Now Vivienne sees those assumptions as signs of weakness in herself. Cat is one of the strongest women—no, people—she knows. Her tears show her empathy, her heightened sense of the pain of others. What is weak about that?
Once Vivienne had been released from the hospital, Cat insisted on staying in the loft room, right up until she went into labor. Vivienne will never forget the night when Cat woke her, actually relieved her from a terrible nightmare, to say that she had to get to the hospital. They called a taxi and met Ziggy there. Just two hours later, a baby girl with a thick head of brown, curly hair arrived. They named her Angharad (Welsh formuch loved, which had been Vivienne’s suggestion, and made her think of Melvin). Since the birth, Cat and Angharad regularly stayed over, utilizing the cot Vivienne had had set up in the loft room.
