Page 47 of Unforgivable

“No! I mean…no, I swear, it had nothing to do with Jack, believe it or not.” I rub my forehead again, I do it hard enough to hurt. “I feel so stupid. I’m so sorry, Bronwyn, let me explain.” I glance behind me. “Can we go outside?”

“Why?”

Because I can’t bear to look at you in this harsh light. You look so sad, so white, so confused. Because I’m ashamed.“Please?”

She gives me a small nod, carefully puts the notebook back in the box, and with slow, deliberate movements she puts the lid back on.

“I meant it as a joke,” I say lamely.

She’s sitting on Charlie’s swing under the birch tree. Somewhere down the hill someone is having a party, but only the bass line makes it up here.

I walk barefoot on the cold grass and come to stand a few feet away from her. She doesn’t look at me, just swings slowly, using one foot to push herself off the ground. “Careful with that,” I say. “I don’t know how solid it is for non-Charlie-sized people.”

She looks up at me. I rub my forehead.

“Sorry. You probably know that already. You probably put it there.” I lean against the back of the iron bench, facing her.

I’m cold, and my robe is heavier than hers, but while she’s shaking, I don’t think it’s from the temperature. Her negligee—barely there—is open. Underneath she’s wearing a pale silk nightgown. She pulls out a packet of Dunhill from a pocket, taps it out, lights a cigarette with a shaking finger.

“I don’t understand,” she says, pressing the heel of her hand on one eye, then the other. “Why would it be you? Did youloveJack? Back when he and I were still married? Was something going on between the two of you?”

“No! Oh God no, never, I swear! I was just…” She glances at me in the darkness, and I look away, trying to find the words to describe what the hell I was thinking when I did what I did, and I can’t.

“I really need to understand, Laura.”

“I know.”

So I tell her the truth.

TWENTY-THREE

Why did I agree to paint Bronwyn’s portrait? For the money, for sure, but as soon as I walked in, I knew I’d made a mistake. She had the perfect life, the perfect house, the perfect marriage. There are people who go through life behaving badly with no consequences, and she was one of them. She was lucky. I was never lucky, or I didn’t think I was, back then. I always felt like I had to fight for my luck. Like life was one big hunger game.

At first, she behaved like we were old friends who had lost touch and how nice that we were catching up after all these years, and did I ever find out what happened to so and so? And so and so? And remember so and so? I had no memory who any of these people were. I’d spent that year with my head down, trying to make myself as small and invisible as possible. I didn’t want to talk about the past, I just wanted to do the job, take my money and go.

Amazingly, I’d forgotten how insecure Bronwyn could be, under those layers of cool confidence. Which was odd, considering it was that same insecurity—although back then I thought of it as her sense of superiority, and after that her complete and total narcissistic personality—that had caused me so much grief all these years ago. Jack and I barely spoke back then, just polite interactions upon the stairs. Some days he would come home and she’d ask questions that made me blush for her. Where had he been? Who had he seen? And Jack would say something completely ordinary. He’d been at his office, at the gym, playing squash. Then one day she told me she had to fire the babysitter because she thought—and this she confided in me—that the young woman was sleeping with Jack and I thought, my God, you really are paranoid. I would have bet my bottom dollar the babysitter had done no such thing. Her only crime was to be younger and available.

I suppose sitting here now, my toes curling in the grass, I have to admit to myself that maybe I did hate her. I always say that I didn’t, and that I don’t, and that whatever goes on between her and Jack is between her and Jack, and our history is a bleep in the scheme of things, but in the cold dark of night, having to own up on what I did, I can’t explain it, even to myself.

I thought I was being funny. Throwing a little spanner into her perfect life.

It was born more out of opportunity than malice. One day I used their ensuite bathroom because the guest one was blocked and Jack’s suit jacket was laid out on the bed. I had my purse with me and for my own amusement I sprayed a little of my perfume on the inside of the collar. It was just a little prank, but when I returned the next day, I could tell Bronwyn had been crying. On the surface she posed the way she usually did, but every time there was a noise outside, her eyes would dart to the window, like a Labrador waiting for its beloved master. Finally, she blurted, “I think Jack is having an affair.” Then she asked me what I thought she should do, if she should confront him. That was Bronwyn in a nutshell. She just assumed I’d be invested in her problems, maybe even make them my problems too and wrack my brain for a solution. But meanwhile, I’d found her Achilles heel and I was going to have some fun. I started leaving little clues, a trace of lipstick on his shirt collar, a little love note in his pocket, which I practiced in my little yellow notepad. I thought it was hilarious. Then Bronwyn would confide her fears in me and I couldn’t get enough of it. She’d ask me, who the hell is Beth? And I’d say, someone at work maybe? And she’d say, what do you think she looks like? And I’d shrug and say, well, Jack is drop-dead handsome and he has very discerning tastes, so I imagine she’s a knockout, and she’d look like she was in pain and nod, yes, yes, she must be a knockout, Jack only goes for knockouts, thereby giving herself a little boost. She did confront him and she’d tell me Jack was swearing to her till he was blue in the face that he had no idea who Beth was, and I’d say, well clearly he’s lying. Are you going to let him take you for a fool?

And then, suddenly, and it really seemed very sudden, barely a month later, she moved out. I found out when I returned to the house to pick up some brushes I’d left behind. Jack was alone, red-eyed from tears and lack of sleep. He told me that Bronwyn had left him, accusing him of fucking other women and she couldn’t deal with it any longer. My guess was that her ego couldn’t handle it. She’d found someone else to seduce. Someone richer, an Italian millionaire surgeon, so that in the end she could say, “No, Jack didn’t have an affair!He worshipped me! But we’d drifted apart. I met someone else. He was devastated of course but what can you do? Life is about love, and you have to follow your heart wherever it takes you.”

I was thrilled, I won’t lie.I’d broken her perfect life, and I wasn’t even trying. Then Jack said she didn’t even want Charlie. She’d left her behind, and I was shocked. Only then I felt guilty about what I’d done. I didn’t think it was entirely my fault because whoever walks out on their family on the basis of a torn page from a cheap notepad has something else going on, but I wondered if I’d triggered it in her.

“A joke?” she says now, incredulous. “At my expense? At my family’s expense?”

I don’t know how to answer her because really, from this vantage point, there’s nothing I can find to excuse what I did. I bring the sides of my robe closer together. “I thought you’d figure out it was me, and by then I’d be gone. I didn’t think you’d act on it. I didn’t think you’d leave your family because of it.”

I say this last part with a dash of hope that she’d agree it’s her who’s the problem in all this. I may have been the catalyst, but I didn’t pull the trigger because let’s face it, I’m terrified right now. I don’t know what she will do, or what she will say, and I want to punch myself for leaving that old notebook lying around. I should have put it in the trash back then.

“But why would you do that to me?”

“Why?” Memories of childhood humiliation flood through me. “I was angry with you, Bronwyn. For what you put me through at school. Oh God, come on! Please don’t say you don’t remember!”

At least I’m on firmer ground now. I have moved seamlessly from villain to victim. I remind her, in excruciating detail, of what she put me through. “Because of aboy!” I am fourteen years old again as I stress the word; he was just aboy, you were supposed to be myfriend. “I spent an entire school year being ostracized, laughed at, sneered at, called names, older boys would leave dirty condoms in my schoolbag. No one would sit with me at lunch or hang out with me at recess. I spent a year being humiliated because of you.”

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