THE GIRL BEFORE YOU
Nicola Rayner

Copyright

Published by AVON

A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins 2019

Copyright © Nicola Rayner 2019

Cover design © HarperCollins

Cover photograph © Alexey Karamanov/Getty Images

Nicola Rayner asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008332730

Ebook Edition © 2019 ISBN: 9780008332723

Version: 2019-05-20

Dedication

For my mother and for Jason

Epigraph

For there is no friend like a sister

In calm or stormy weather;

To cheer one on the tedious way,

To fetch one if one goes astray.

Christina Rossetti

Everything in the world is about sex except sex.

Sex is about power.

Oscar Wilde

Author’s Note

Anyone looking at a map will struggle to find the university town of St Anthony’s. In truth, the inspiration for this fictional setting comes from an amalgam of places: it is halfway between Durham and St Andrews, and the town’s history also draws on that of Alnmouth in Northumberland – a place shaped by what it lost.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Author’s Note

Prologue

Alice

Naomi

Alice

Kat

Alice

Kat

Naomi

Alice

Kat

Naomi

Alice

Naomi

Kat

Alice

Naomi

Kat

Naomi

Alice

Kat

Naomi

Alice

Naomi

Kat

Naomi

Alice

Naomi

Alice

Kat

Naomi

Alice

Naomi

Kat

Naomi

Kat

Alice

Kat

Alice

Kat

Naomi

Alice

Naomi

Kat

Naomi

Kat

Alice

Kat

Alice

Naomi

Alice

Naomi

Kat

Naomi

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

Prologue

The last time I saw my sister she was getting ready for a party. She took particular care that night and we were quiet as we prepared, unaware of all those years of silence to come. Ruth used coconut oil, as she always did, to smooth down her unruly red hair. As she closed the hot tongs, the steam from the oil smelled like summer – suntan lotion and Malibu. It should be a happy scent, but every time I come across it now, it takes me back to that night. We had talked our way through her problem and come up with a plan. And I had confided what had been gnawing at me, too. We both knew what we had to do.

I can see her as she pats her pale face with foundation, flicks mascara on her lashes and adds a slash of red lipstick. She pins up her hair and puts on an emerald dress. When she is ready, she grabs her handbag. It holds her cigarettes, a lighter, of course, her wallet, her lipstick and condoms. These were the last things she carried.

Her eyes looked so bright and full of hope. I wish I had said something else, something different, but I just said: ‘Don’t forget your Dorothy slippers.’ And she grinned and slid her feet into the red sequinned shoes.

At the top of the stairs I hugged her and was surprised once again by how little there was of her, as if she’d started disappearing already. I said, ‘Good luck.’ Then, as she left, I called down the stairs, ‘Love you.’ It was an afterthought, a superstition. The words got lost, pinging down the steep wooden staircase, and I couldn’t be sure she’d heard me as she pushed the door open and slipped through.

Alice

January 2016

The rattle and hum of trains always make Alice sleepy. She had been up at five to get the six fifteen to Edinburgh from King’s Cross. At the shrill bleep of the alarm, George had groaned and rolled over, burying his face in his pillow as she pulled her clothes on in the dark. His hangovers had got particularly bad since he’d made the move from politics to TV. She’d felt half glad she was out of London for the day.

Edinburgh had made her nostalgic. She and George had visited the city for a couple of days early in their courtship. There had been something special about that weekend: away from the influence of his friends, George was tender and attentive – plus, of course, Edinburgh on the run-up to Christmas was magical.

They’d ice-skated hand-in-hand in the shadow of the castle, warmed up with hot chocolate and even taken a trip on the big wheel. As it was caught at the top of its cycle, hovering between travelling up and coming down, George had looked at her for a long time as if he were going to say something, but didn’t.

Later, in the Vietnamese restaurant where they’d had supper, he listened to Alice’s career plans with particular attentiveness – though family law was hardly the most romantic of subjects – and surprised her by chatting to the waiter in Vietnamese. She’d looked at him so proudly then, with an ache that had long since faded.

Coming out of the restaurant, walking downhill to their B & B, George stopped Alice mid-path with a kiss. The wind was wild that night and, as he stood in front of her, his red scarf flapped in front of his face and her hair blew into her mouth. He almost had to shout it when he said: ‘I love you, Alice Reynolds.’ It was the most romantic thing that had ever happened to her.

‘I meant what I said,’ he told her that night at the B & B between squeaks of the bed. ‘You have saved me.’ She didn’t ask: from what?

Alice exhales. Her breath mists up the window and she wipes her hand across the cold glass. Taking the newspaper from her bag, she settles in for the journey home. Behind her she hears the refreshments trolley rattling its way through the carriage and decides to have a gin and tonic. There’s no lemon, of course; the surly girl serving looks at her as if she’s mad when she asks, but there’s ice, at least.

As the sting of alcohol hits the back of her throat, she sighs. It has been a good day, work-wise; the conference went well. But she can’t shake the fluttering sense of disquiet, of something coming back for her. She has started waking in the middle of the night, frightened for some reason, unable to remember why. Her doctor has prescribed sleeping tablets. Opening her handbag, Alice touches the small packet with a fingertip. She thinks, for just a second, of having one, so she can sleep all the way back to London, and then pushes the thought away, taking another slug of gin. That will do. She doesn’t need them often.

The train judders to a halt at Durham and as the doors hiss open they let in an icy gust of January air. A large, suited man, carrying a briefcase, folds himself into the seat opposite Alice. She crosses her legs, irritated, tidies the miniature bottle of gin into the brown paper bag the girl had provided and unfolds her paper.

She glances for a moment at a photo of George in the television pages. His first show is airing tonight. She still can’t get her head around George’s new career – he had been in politics as long as she’d known him, president of St Anthony’s student union the year they met. She hadn’t been sure how he would fare as a presenter, but in the previews she had seen he’d done well. His sense of humour came across. The show, the first in a series exploring the lives of famous British politicians, allowed him to make a few self-deprecating jokes and a few at the expense of other people, too. George would just say what he thought and in television today that seemed to be a key requirement. Alice has always envied him that quality. He’s looking jowly, though, she notices – something she never sees when he’s right in front of her.

She skims through the piece but finds she wants a break from work – hers and George’s – and instead gets out a pen to do the crossword. Even then it isn’t long before the letters begin to swim before her eyes. Scrunching up her scarf, she tucks it under her head, insulating herself from the freezing glass of the window. She feels her shoulders unclench and closes her eyes.

As she drifts in and out of sleep, Alice feels as though she is being watched. She opens her eyes once or twice, glances at the man opposite her, but he is hiding behind his paper – reading the story about George. It makes her feel peculiar. A part of her is taken over by a childlike desire to say, ‘That’s my husband – you’re reading about my husband.’ She swallows hard and closes her eyes again. There is a faint smell of something tropical in the air. It’s an unlikely scent at this time of year but pleasant, like sun cream or rum.

The carriage fills up as she dozes. She hears a group of boys get on at York. They sit in a huddle not far behind her, and the hiss and click of their cans of lager permeate her sleep. At one stage, one of them comes over and tries to talk to someone across the aisle from her. ‘All right, darling. Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?’ Alice strains to catch the reply and, though the girl speaks too softly for Alice to hear her words, their meaning is clear in the young man’s hasty retreat.

Nosiness gets the better of Alice and she takes a quick look at where she imagines the girl is sitting, but she can’t see much – just a pair of slim legs crossed towards her. She closes her eyes again and drifts off.

When, at last, she wakes up properly, Alice feels sticky and hot. The sun has gone down and the lights on the train have been switched on. She squints out of the window into the darkness, trying to work out how far they’ve got, but there’s now too little light for her to tell – just dark, indecipherable shapes whistling by. She looks for a second at her own face – pale, almost haggard in the dark glass. It’s not a flattering light; she runs a tired hand through her hair.

She scans other faces in the reflection. The man opposite her is looking at photographs on his smartphone, running his fingers over the screen. Alice thinks she spies the flesh tones of naked skin and holds her gaze a little too long, trying to make out what the shapes are – porn? Glancing up, the man catches her looking at him in the window. The faintest of smiles flickers on his lips, but Alice frowns and looks away.

On the other side of the aisle, a mother and her small daughter reading together cause her a twinge of pain. She still has them: phantom visceral experiences. Nothing dramatic like giving birth or breast-feeding – maybe because she doesn’t know what they would feel like – but other sensations. She’d bought a friend’s child a cardigan recently, a dear hand-knitted thing, and she’d had the sense, as she held it, of dressing an infant: pushing its arms into the sleeves, the wriggly feeling of resistance in the child’s limbs; it had been so strong, so clear, that she felt the weight of the baby in her arms for a moment.

Alice’s gaze falls upon the girl who’d been chatted up, two seats behind the mother and child; she is sitting by the window, facing Alice. Her face is obscured by a curtain of hair and the angle at which she’s sitting. Her hair is an almost shockingly bright red and the sight of it – the feeling of envy Alice experiences as she looks at it – stirs a sense of déjà vu. Alice shivers, pulls her scarf tighter around her shoulders. She feels spooked. Just for a second she has pictured the girl’s hair under water – spread out like seaweed. Why would she think of that?

The cadence of the train changes as they enter a tunnel. The world outside – smudged grey before – becomes reflective black. Alice glances at herself again. Her reflection now is sharper, harder-edged. She can see more detail on her face. She runs a finger along the rings beneath her eyes and thinks about an old university friend she’d bumped into at the family law conference. He had aged well. He was so thin at college but he’d grown into his face now; he still carried himself in the same way, though: calmly, lightly, as if he knew his place in the world.

They had been close during Alice’s early days at university. He would fetch her for lectures and listen to her chat on the way there. In the morning light, St Anthony’s looked like a film set. There was no one else around to worry about or impress and he had a soothing presence.

One morning, he had asked her to his room for a smoke and Alice, unused to marijuana, had giggled and giggled. They ended up lying on his narrow bed listening to reggae, their slender arms round each other, feeling almost weightless. Alice had never felt so relaxed. She had longed for him to kiss her, but he hadn’t.

When she’d told Christie about him, her best friend had simply said, ‘Dopehead,’ screwing up her nose. And, not long after, Alice had got together with George. They passed the dopehead once after a black-tie do. Alice had had a couple of glasses of wine and was teetering on her heels. She had shrieked his name as he slunk past. ‘This is George,’ she said, proudly pushing her new boyfriend forwards. The boy never really talked to her after that and at the conference, though he had been friendly, that wariness had remained.

Alice brushes a hand over her eyes. Later, she will wonder why her gaze returned to the girl with red hair. She looks back in the dark glass to where the girl had been sitting and sees she has moved into the aisle seat. She is reading and her hair is pushed back.

She looks up from the book and towards Alice. Hers is a memorable face – not one Alice would forget. Her skin looks pale against the black backdrop of the glass. Her eyes are like black holes but, for a fraction of a second, there is a telling tension around them as she squints in recognition and then looks quickly away. Alice stares. She can’t move. For seconds she is frozen. As she stands and turns to look at the girl straight on, she notices the edges of her field of vision are starting to turn black, like looking down a tunnel. She takes a step and starts to speak, but her own voice sounds strange, as if she’s listening to it through water. Her ears feel like they need to pop. She says abruptly: ‘I think I’m going to faint,’ and feels her knees buckle.

She slumps back in the seat, staring up at the luggage rack. The man sitting opposite her pops into her line of vision. ‘Are you OK? Can I get you some water?’

Alice sits up slowly and looks over to where the girl had been. There is no one there. She feels washed out, diluted. She asks: ‘Did you see a girl with red hair, just opposite?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’ He smiles sheepishly. ‘But I was just looking at my baby.’ He waggles his mobile at her and Alice glances at a photo of a naked infant. ‘You look terribly pale.’

Alice tries to control her breath. The man is looking at her closely.

‘I had a shock,’ she says quickly. ‘She looked so like someone I was at university with. But she …’ Alice lowers her voice so the little girl across the aisle won’t be able to hear. ‘She drowned – the girl – so it couldn’t have been her.’ She realises she sounds a bit mad.

He smiles kindly. ‘Did you know her well?’

Alice looks down at her lap. ‘Not particularly,’ she says eventually. She tries to recall the girl’s name. She used to know it. Christie would remember. She adds: ‘I’m not usually like this. I’m a lawyer.’ As if that makes a difference.

On the tube home, it comes back to her: Ruth Walker. Alice murmurs the words to herself in the noisy carriage. It was a name she’d heard a lot the summer that Ruth drowned. She hadn’t really known her, but stories and superstitions about Ruth’s death had rippled through the student community at that time and somehow things had never been quite the same afterwards. Her name became a way of chiding a friend for staggering home alone drunk or turning down the suggestion of an impromptu night swim. It was as if a shadow had been cast over them – though, of course, her disappearance hadn’t been the only loss that summer.

Perhaps for this reason, she promises herself she won’t say anything that night. But then a few glasses of wine loosen her resolve. It’s simply too good a story. It’s just a kitchen supper with Christie and Teddy to celebrate George’s first show, which they guffaw their way through after too much Sauvignon Blanc. Alice’s feeling rather giddy and emotional, and it suddenly feels important – imperative – to tell the story out loud, to someone other than George, who had merely held a hand to her forehead and asked how she was getting on with those tablets. She wishes she hadn’t told him about those either.

So when she finally says it, her voice sounds strange – a touch too high – as she stands up to clear the plates. ‘You remember that girl Ruth?’ She talks over her husband’s shaking head and addresses the table beyond. Christie’s the only one really paying attention, as usual. George is looking rather pale and Teddy is holding an empty champagne bottle up to the light to see if there’s anything left. ‘The one who drowned,’ Alice adds.

And that seems to get their attention: Teddy puts down the bottle, George murmurs, ‘Not now, darling.’

Christie frowns. ‘What about her?’

Alice leans her hip against the dresser, still holding the plates. ‘I had the weirdest experience,’ she says. Pronouncing the word ‘experience’ is a struggle: she is drunker than she thought. ‘I was coming back from Edinburgh today and there’s this girl in the aisle opposite … woman, really – well, our age. In her thirties. And she looks the spit, the absolute spit of Ruth – or how she would look now. Extraordinary. And she died – what? – fifteen years ago.’

‘Spooky,’ breathes Christie, ‘a doppelgänger – do you think we all have one? I remember hearing, actually …’

‘No,’ says Alice firmly, not about to surrender the conch so easily. ‘It wasn’t just a resemblance; it was more than that. I couldn’t help myself: I got up to say something. Now here’s the thing …’

‘Now here’s the thing,’ mimics George, stabbing the air with a fork.

‘Shut up, George,’ says Alice. She considers leaving the anecdote unfinished. Tonight, after all, is a celebration.

But Christie, scraping her pudding plate with a teaspoon, is waiting for the end of the story.

‘What happened?’

Alice pauses. ‘She disappeared,’ she says eventually. ‘I felt very odd – had a sort of turn – and when I looked again she had completely vanished.’

Before taking a tablet, Alice tries to send herself to sleep by making lists in her head: clients she needs to email, thank-you letters to be written, ingredients for the week’s suppers or, on happier days, things she would like to do – perfect her Italian, learn how to knit. But today she can’t focus on the lists. Her attention keeps getting tugged back to the woman on the train and the look that flickered across her face.

And just as she is sinking into sleep, half-dreaming, half-awake, Alice’s drifting mind alights on a memory of a party. She was on the periphery, uncertain of herself: a first year at this third-year gathering. She remembers spotting George. She had started to notice him at parties. On the other side of the room, his arm propped him up in the doorway as he surveyed the scene – with the careless arrogance, she had thought then, that only the obscenely good-looking or wealthy could afford. George, with his squat looks, hadn’t been particularly blessed in the former department, though he made up for it in self-belief; but he’d had Dan with him – tall and chiselled. Yes, it may well have been to him, next to George, that her eye was first drawn, before she noticed the approach of the girl with red hair, who charged towards George, holding her face inches away from his, and shouted something with such vehemence that Alice had flinched.

Was that detail added by her drifting mind, in the process of a memory becoming a dream? Alice wonders, suddenly awake. Had George laughed in her face and had she, the girl, spat some invective at him before storming off? Had it been at this same party that George later appeared by Alice’s side with a warm glass of wine in his hand and said, ‘I saw you looking,’ in such a way that had made her laugh?

‘I think you knew her,’ Alice says aloud to her gently snoring husband.

‘What, darling?’ His arm, heavy with sleep, slumps over her body.

‘That girl,’ says Alice. ‘Ruth. I think you knew her.’

Naomi

It hasn’t happened for years. I’m in the Co-op staring at the fish, deciding between mackerel and cod, and the woman next to me in the cold section begins to fidget, interrupting my train of thought. She keeps glancing towards me as if she recognises me.

‘We’ve met before,’ she says at last.

She has a Geordie accent, is small and birdlike, with a nest of wiry hair and steel-rimmed glasses perched on the end of her nose.

‘I don’t think so,’ I say politely. I reach for the mackerel, put it in my basket and begin to walk away.

That is it for a moment. And then she remembers where she’s seen me.

‘I was there,’ she calls after me. ‘In St Anthony’s. The whole town … the whole town was looking for her.’

I turn back. I should have known from her accent.

‘One of my friends found the dress. Red, wasn’t it?’

I stand very still. ‘Green,’ I say.

‘I always thought it was red.’

‘No,’ I say. ‘That was her shoes.’

‘I worked that night at the ball.’ She takes a step towards me. ‘She kept coming to refill her glass. I felt dreadful when I heard she’d gone swimming afterwards. She never should, in that state.’

Everyone with even the slightest connection to Ruth’s death loves to tell their story. She takes another step. Her hair is in a dreadful state close up: coarse and dry. Her teeth are yellowing. Her breath smells faintly of fish. Such small things, matters of hygiene, make my stomach turn at the moment.

She says: ‘I’m so sorry. That’s all I wanted to say: I’m sorry. It must have been terrible.’

‘It was,’ I say.

‘I have a feeling,’ she continues in a low voice, ‘that in some way she’ll be back in your life before the year is out.’

‘Thank you.’ My voice sounds flat and strange. ‘But she’s gone.’

‘Well, maybe it’s just her spirit living on in you.’ She looks down at my belly, though I’m not showing yet. I’m only eight weeks in.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Like I said,’ she nods, ‘I have feelings about these things.’ She looks pleased with herself. ‘It’s a boy,’ she adds. ‘I know you and your partner would prefer a girl, but it’s a boy.’

I look at the door.

‘It’s not over,’ she says.

‘It’ll never be over,’ I hear myself reply. ‘She was my sister.’ The hiss of the first syllable, the rap of the second. Not a soft, gentle word, really, in the way it’s not a soft, gentle thing – which you would think it might be, if you didn’t have a sister. Before, in my other life, it was a noun I had used and heard thousands of times. ‘Is Ruth Walker your sister?’ ‘Your sister is in trouble again.’ ‘You must be clever, like your sister.’ Words, questions, phrases that made me irritated or proud but can never be used lightly or unthinkingly now. I’ve got to get out of here.

Walking away I’m careful not to look around, but I can feel her eyes on my back. My breath is trapped in my chest: a tense little pocket of air. I can’t always see panic approaching before it’s there, breathing down my neck. I place my basket on the floor as carefully as I can, and walk swiftly through the whirring cold section of the store and out through the sliding doors. As I glance back, I think she’s still there, standing like Lot’s wife, watching me go.

The frosty air hits my face like a slap, but it staves off the panic. I grasp a bike railing for a second to steady myself and tell myself firmly: Naomi, calm the fuck down. I cling on as the dizziness subsides. The cars slosh past on South Ealing Road, their headlights piercing the drizzle. The moment passes. I pull my hood up, tuck my chin into my chest and pace home. It’s not far, but the fresh air clears my head. And I think of Ruth.

She was fearless. I can never silence the small voice in me that reminds me something can go wrong – a flash, a premonition of an accident before it happens. My mother is the same – she would watch Ruth on her pony through splayed fingers and only I, standing next to her, would hear the sharp intake of breath as the animal approached a jump, see the quick smile on her face when they landed safely on the other side.

But Ruth loved jumping: the euphoria of leaving the ground, the purpose of it, the way the pony’s muscles would tense before taking off then stretch out as it soared. The knack was to lean forwards, not to try to contain it but to move with it, embrace the leap. I think she got that kind of thrill-seeking from our father; my mother and I have a different kind of courage.

She left her shoes behind. I gave them to her, her Dorothy slippers, red and sparkling. She was wearing them for luck that night. She placed them on the beach so neatly – which was rare for Ruth – with her handbag next to them. The police told us that often happens when people go missing.

A stinging wind picks up and, as I turn into our road, it really begins to pour. I run the last stretch, slapping my feet against the wet concrete. I think of the tiny being inside me and wonder if he or she can feel the impact as we run.

Carla has started cooking as I get home. The sweet, woody smell of cumin seeds fills the kitchen. It needs a good clean, I notice as I come in, but there’ll be time enough for that once I’m off work. I bury my face between Carla’s shoulder blades and she curls an arm behind her to hug me.

‘Did you get those bits?’

‘No. Sorry.’ I reach for Carla’s glass of red wine on the counter, breathe in its oaky fumes. ‘Something happened.’ I hesitate. ‘A self-styled psychic. One of those. She wanted to talk about Ruth.’

‘It’s been ages since you’ve had that sort of thing.’ Carla frowns as she stirs the popping seeds. ‘Did she know her?’

I take a small sip of wine. ‘No, not really. She was from St Anthony’s.’ I put the glass down, and try not to think of Ruth’s dress lying sodden and torn on the beach. ‘She could tell I was pregnant. We’re having a boy, apparently.’ I try to smile.

Carla looks down at my belly, puts a possessive hand over it. ‘That is weird. You really can’t tell yet.’

You would think, what with Carla being a therapist, that she would be familiar with the more esoteric aspects of human nature, but the fact is she’s the most down-to-earth person I know. We met in a group therapy session she was leading. It was instantaneous.

At the end of the first session, I waited to talk to her. She was shuffling our questionnaires into a blue folder. I hadn’t planned what I would say and, as I approached her, she didn’t look up at me at first, just said: ‘I think you ought to join another group.’

‘Really? I like your group,’ I said petulantly.

‘I think you know why.’

She looked up at me then. And she was right, I did. It was frightening falling for someone like that, after the last time.

‘I don’t know what to do about it,’ I whispered.

She laughed at me: ‘Well, after you’ve quit my group, we’ll go for a drink and take it from there.’

And, really, it was remarkably straightforward. I joined another group and we dated the British way, at the pub. I went back to her flat one afternoon, a few weeks after that first meeting, and never left.

That night, the dream returns. The one I always have. We are running through St Anthony’s, up one of the roads that winds from the sea. Ruth is calling: ‘Come on, slowcoach. Last one there’s a rotten egg.’ But she is always ahead of me, pushing further on until, eventually, she moves almost out of sight. I see a flash of her red shoes, her red hair disappearing around the corner. I hear her feet ringing out on the pavement just in front of me. And then I realise I can’t hear them any more. It is silent. And I start to shout: ‘Ruth? Ruth?’ There is just the sound of my own voice returning to me.

The panic begins then. And even though it is a dream, I can tell I have felt that particular sensation before. Because there’s more I need to ask her. There’s so much more to say.

The way I’m moving is less like running now, more like drifting, floating above the ground like a helium balloon. And as I turn the final corner, right at the top of town, I come across her red shoes on the pavement. They have been left there placed parallel, as if on purpose, as if they were a sign.

I wake gasping for air. The jolt of my waking stirs Carla. She murmurs something in her sleep, curves her body in a question mark around mine. It takes my eyes a few moments to adjust to the shadowed room. I lie in the dark, listening to Carla’s steady breathing, left with the sensation of the dream: that Ruth was just here; that she has only just gone. And, as always, at times like this – in the cold hours of night when I’ve woken with a jolt – the same old questions come flooding back. It’s as if they have been waiting for me.

What was on her mind as she got into the water? And did she think of me as she fought for her life? How it might feel to carry on living in the world without her? But there’s always one question that’s louder than the others, more insistent: was my sister in the water on her own? Or was there someone with her? Someone who placed her shoes and bag on the ground so neatly. Someone who wanted her gone.

Alice

Alice puts the last of the previous evening’s plates in the dishwasher. After a broken night, she finally drifted to sleep at dawn, missing George as he scrambled out of bed to get to a morning radio interview. He hasn’t really paused since his career change in the way she hoped he might. He’s on his phone the whole time, only half there in the evenings or the weekends, always in another place while he’s in the room with her.

She’s not much better. Often, the pair of them will sit together at the kitchen table at their laptops or side by side on the sofa tapping away on their own devices, which reminds her: she needs to email her newest client – the wife of one of George’s former colleagues. Alice frowns: George hadn’t been happy that she’d agreed to take on the case – a high-profile divorce between the Tory MP and his wife, a couple in their sixties who are separating after almost four decades of marriage. But she’s always got on well with the other woman, who, with her iron-straight bob and an unfussy, businesslike way of dressing, reminds Alice a little of herself.

As she fetches a cloth and wipes down the kitchen table, she notices that the uneasy feeling from yesterday has persisted. The episode on the train has a dreamlike quality as she reflects back. She thinks again of Ruth shouting in George’s face. Was that the party where they’d first got together? He’s always quite foggy about it – all the booze, no doubt – but Alice had thought she could recall it pretty clearly. And yet she hadn’t remembered the girl before – perhaps that had been a different party …

She’d wanted to impress George that night, for him to notice her. She’d dressed with him in mind. By that stage, of course, Christie had already snared Teddy – Alice smiles at the choice of the word ‘snared’ – but it’s one Christie, with her eye on Teddy’s castle in Scotland, might have used herself. Back then, the third-year boys had seemed like prizes to the freshers. She smirks at the thought now. Of course, George’s family has never had the sort of money that Teddy’s did – but certain doors would always be open to the Bells. George’s grandfather and his father were barristers. Perhaps that was why he’d ended up marrying a lawyer himself. They’re a family who make things happen – even his mother serves on the parish council in the Oxfordshire village where they live, where she held sway in her usual terrifying manner, no doubt. No wonder George became a politician.

His parents had backed him all the way, down to helping him to find a cottage when he was MP for Witney. The papers had mocked him as a mummy’s boy, but George hadn’t been bothered – ‘Everyone accepts help from their family,’ he’d say to her in private. There had even been a photo or two of his mother picking fluff off his collar in public, straightening his tie, that sort of thing, but George shook it off in the way a less charismatic man might not.

It’s not that George is cool – more that he genuinely doesn’t give two hoots about what people say. He could laugh off almost everything. Alice has the opposite problem, she thinks as she switches the kettle on: she cares too much about almost everything – her work, her clients, what people think. She’s learned over the years to care less, or hide it better, but the old worries that somehow she’s faked her way to success, that people might see through her, needle away at her. Her parents, both teachers, are very different from George’s. Her father, as the head of the Warwickshire state school she’d gone to, had an inner confidence, but he is a quiet person, self-contained. Alice catches him sometimes watching George as if trying to figure him out, while her mother, even after all these years, is jumpy around George’s family. She knocks things over, laughs too shrilly. Although she hates that she’s embarrassed by such things, Alice notices herself working extra-hard to smooth everything over when they’re all together – trying to overexplain or soften George’s quips, or to encourage her parents to relax more. Needless to say, George never sees any of this silent work going on, she thinks, with a flicker of anger.

The whistle of the kettle breaks this line of thought. Alice makes a cup of tea and takes it to the kitchen table. She opens her laptop and checks her email. There’s one from Elizabeth Gregory, the politician’s wife, saying how pleased she is that Alice is representing her. Her husband is having an affair with a young researcher on his team. The pair of them shared an eye-roll at that at their last meeting. ‘It’s not just the cliché of it,’ her client had confided. She’d closed her eyes – ‘It makes me sad for something I’ve lost, too. Something the pair of us have lost that he’s trying to get back without me.’

It was her sense of fairness that had drawn Alice to divorce law, that the quiet work of women should be recognised. Even in her own parents’ marriage there were inequalities. Her father could forge ahead with his career because her mother had looked after Alice and her sister. Often, her father had been home in time for bedtime stories, it’s true, but then that was the fun part of childcare – not the endless rounds of washing clothes, preparing meals, packing gym kits, remembering which child had which hobby on which days, driving around the countryside, and keeping their timetables and friendships and teachers in her head.

‘What makes me mad when I think of it now,’ Elizabeth had said, pausing to blow on her cup of coffee, ‘is the way he used to talk about me. If someone asked me a question about the children, he’d say, ‘Oh, I don’t deal with any of that. Ask my wife.’ The way he said it promoted me to the most important person in his life, but also made me, somehow, not important at all. How could I be absolutely crucial and yet as irrelevant to him as hired help? It’s hard to explain.’

She hadn’t had to: Alice had seen it enough in other marriages; though, in truth, it had always been different in her own. In his favour, George never demands too much of her in the way of housework or ironing. Their cleaner, Mrs T, looks after all that. Alice organises the Ocado deliveries, remembers birthdays, writes thank-you notes. What does George do? ‘I bring the fun,’ he would say. Not to mention their house in Notting Hill, which his parents had helped with. Distasteful as it is to think about it, there are advantages to being married to George, there’s no doubt about it.

Alice tries to remember more about the party where she’d seen Ruth, but not much more comes to her. She closes her eyes and tries again, recalls, on a separate occasion, walking into the college bar with her hand in George’s, and seeing Ruth and a friend of hers, Kat, exchange a glance, not a happy one, at the sight of them. They said a few words to each other and got up to go. As they passed George and Alice, Ruth looked as if she was about to say something, but Kat tugged at her sleeve: ‘Don’t.’

‘Do you know those girls?’ Alice had asked after they’d gone.

‘What girls?’ George asked, but then he’d seen Dan and bellowed a greeting at him. And that was that.

He and Dan were inseparable. They’d come up to St Anthony’s from Eton together with Teddy and a couple of others – a gang with a point to prove, perhaps, having not made it into Oxbridge. Alice had always been quite envious of the way George had started with a ready-made group. But of all his friends, Dan had been George’s closest. They made a funny pair – Dan was tall, slim and silent, George stout and loquacious. Dan’s looks would draw the girls to them but George’s charm would make them stay.

Alice had always liked George the most. A little shy herself, she’d found it hard to know what to say to Dan and he never gave much back. Whenever George popped to the bar and left them alone, Alice would find herself tongue-tied, unsure how to interact with Dan on her own. The thing was, she thinks now, it seemed that a part of him enjoyed how uneasy she was, as if it were a game.

When George came back from the bar, he’d say, ‘How are you chaps getting along?’

And once, Dan had said, ‘Oh, we’re getting along famously.’ It was a little piece of nastiness that only Alice could appreciate.

Another time, they’d gone out dancing and Alice, after a tipple too many, started mucking around with a pole, swinging around it sexily and giggling at George as she did.

George had grinned and blown her a kiss, but he’d been distracted by the time she returned to the table.

‘Great dancing,’ Dan had said in a tone that implied he meant quite the opposite. ‘Really sexy.’

Once or twice, when George was in one of his tender moods, in bed perhaps or after a few glasses of wine, Alice might ask: ‘Does Dan like me?’

And George would look completely puzzled and say: ‘Of course, you silly thing. Why would you ask a question like that?’

But it didn’t matter what he said, because Alice always knew, deep down, that Dan didn’t – that he’d never thought Alice was good enough for George. Maybe it was that she’d gone to a state school, or that her family didn’t have as much money as George’s; maybe it was that she didn’t have George’s natural wit, or the confidence of the people who’d grown up in the same social circles as the Etonians. Maybe, she thought on some days, it was because Dan had been in love with George.

She blinks at the laptop screen. No, that was ridiculous. Dan had liked girls. Of course, he had.

But there had been such a strong connection between them, as if they shared some kind of secret. Maybe even a secret related to Ruth Walker – to why she might have hated George enough to shout at him, to leave a room when he entered. Alice sighs. She’s not going to be able to concentrate on anything else unless she does some digging. She picks up her laptop and heads to George’s study.

Kat

October 1999

Dressed in black, Kat smudges her lipstick on her third cigarette. The rush of nicotine makes her feel light-headed, insubstantial. She had been so full of hope for university – had had a rather precise idea about the kind of life she was going to lead. That was why she had picked this wild town on the edge of Britain over a civilised place like London. She had packed a couple of bottles of champagne, nicked from her father’s wine cellar, and cigarettes and the Collected Works of Dorothy Parker – but she had been greeted at the gates by the freshers’ rep, a pale, gangly boy with wispy hair that stuck out in different directions. Not fanciable at all.

She could tell he wasn’t used to girls like Kat – not used to girls full stop – and it hadn’t taken much to make him blush into his tea, make his excuses and scuttle off back to his dusty textbooks. Kat had never been one for making an effort with people she couldn’t see the point of. It was something she had inherited from her father. Not a nice trait, she realised, but then her father wasn’t a very nice man.

But if she liked someone, it was another matter entirely, as if a light bulb had been switched on. It had been like that the other night in what passed for this town’s only nightclub. She’d met him a few drinks in, so she couldn’t remember exactly how things had started. There she had been, waiting by the bar, and he seemed to have appeared beside her. Messy hair, dark eyes, low voice. Soothing to be around, a measured way of speaking and holding himself. And she had felt a kind of certainty, a kind of excitement.

And admittedly, she’d had five, or maybe six, vodka cranberries at that stage, so the certainty could have just been an epiphany created by booze and a handsome face. But then she had woken up the next day early and surprisingly clear-headed, sure that something important had begun, and a couple of days later the feeling had barely shifted.

No one she’d asked knew who he was. It didn’t help that she couldn’t remember his name. He was a second year – she recalled that much – and he played the guitar in a band and could quote Dorothy Parker.

And now, at this party, there he is again and Kat, who is never nervous, is experiencing a fluttering feeling in her limbs. Strange how liking someone can distil into a single detail: the smell of his cologne, the feeling of his arm under your hand, the sound of his laugh. With this guy it’s his voice – low and calming – she can catch the cadence of it from where she is standing. He’s talking to a small bloke next to him, with a keen, ratty face. Kat looks at him steadily, waiting for him to glance at her in return so she can smile, or look away, and let it all begin.

But he doesn’t look at her, because he’s looking at someone else.

Kat has seen the girl before at other freshers’ events. She is wearing a long white dress – a bold choice for a redhead and a touch virginal for Kat’s tastes. There’s something knowingly Pre-Raphaelite about the combination. It calls to mind paintings of tragic heroines, tresses weighed heavy with water and flowers. Still, she has a lively, likeable face, but then, thinks Kat, putting out her cigarette and straightening her dress, before making her way to the messy-haired guy, so does she.

‘Hello again,’ she says.

‘Kat, isn’t it?’ he smiles. ‘This is Jerry.’ He jerks a thumb at the boy he’s standing next to.

‘Richard’s in love,’ says Jerry.

Richard. That was it. Kat tries to smile again and looks over at the redhead.

‘Shut up, Jerry.’ Richard stops looking at the girl and turns to Kat.

‘You can’t take your eyes off her.’ Jerry’s mouth twitches. ‘You know what they say about redheads?’

Kat doesn’t believe for a second that this boy knows anything about redheads – or girls, for that matter. The three of them watch as the girl lights her cigarette in a knowing way and makes her way to the drinks table.

‘Go and talk to her,’ Kat says quickly to Richard.

She doesn’t want him to – of course, she doesn’t want him to – but she will never be one of those women. A memory of her mother hovering around her father pops into her head – who holds onto a man’s sleeve, who begs him to stay.

Richard bites his lip. ‘Maybe later,’ he says quietly. ‘How are you?’

‘When you like someone, you should just try,’ says Kat, ignoring the question, aware of the irony. ‘Just say hello.’

He smiles. ‘Perhaps you’re right.’ He touches her arm to excuse himself. ‘Wish me luck.’

Kat watches Richard as he picks his way across the room. At one point, stuck behind a tight cluster of maths students who won’t make way for him, he glances back at Kat with what looks like a question in his eyes. She smiles brightly and gives him a thumbs-up. As he reaches the drinks table, the redhead is standing with her back to him, which is awkward – so difficult to approach someone like that: do you tap them on the back? Start a conversation with their shoulders? But Kat will never know how that conversation might have started, because there’s a sudden 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 a shake. She returns to her search. Most of the articles that the internet throws up are written by Richard Wiseman, Ruth’s boyfriend at college, now a writer for a leftie national George wouldn’t allow in the house. (‘They’ve never got anything nice to say about me, darling.’)

They’d gone everywhere together, Ruth and Richard. She could see them traipsing around college, lighting each other’s cigarettes, sitting next to each other in the library. Richard had been good-looking in a ruffled sort of way: scruffy dark hair, faded jeans. He’d fronted a college band. Alice remembers seeing Ruth dancing at one of his gigs, leaping up and down with an abandon Alice had envied. These days he looked older, more tired, in his byline photograph, and his face had hardened in a way that Alice couldn’t recall from college.

Ruth Walker and the subjects of mental health and missing people seemed to have shaped a lot of Richard’s journalism. He’d even written a book called The Disappeared about unsolved cases with a chapter about Ruth, who appears in his writing as ‘my ex-girlfriend Ruth Walker’ or ‘my student girlfriend Ruth Walker’ or occasionally ‘my girlfriend Ruth Walker’. Alice wonders how Richard’s current girlfriends, or wife, feel about this. She notices most of the articles are from a few years back. Perhaps the obsession petered out.

Alice copies and pastes the most interesting of the links and emails them to herself. Then, almost out of habit, she has another wander before leaving the room. She goes to George’s desk and tries the drawers. They are locked, as always. The feeling she has as she tries them is always the same: a sort of shame. It’s a similar feeling she gets when she goes to an acquaintance’s Facebook page and their privacy settings mean she can’t see what they’ve been up to. It’s not something you could ever talk about – only a snooper knows when they’ve been locked out. She never used to think of herself as a snooper, but she’s got worse over the years. And it’s become easier, too, with social media to find people, to peek at the way their lives are now. It’s this period in particular, the university years, she can’t leave alone. She scratches away at it like a scab.

Alice perches on the desk. There’s a framed collage of photos on it, which Christie and Teddy had put together for George’s thirtieth with Alice’s help. There’s a photograph of his parents at Ascot, standing to attention for the camera, with his father ruddy-cheeked, his mother in a monstrous hat. Another of George and her with Christie and Teddy on holiday in Greece, all looking a bit sunburned and worse for wear. There’s a photo of Alice on their wedding day. She remembers it being taken, one of the last in a long, long session of photographs, and how, by that stage, her head was beginning to ache with the strain of the tight hairdo, the hairspray, the clips, the constant smiling.

There’s another of George and Dan in black tie at the memorial ball. They look so young – like children. It doesn’t fit with her memory of George and his gang as impossibly sophisticated and cool.

The brrr of the landline makes her jump. It’s an old-fashioned, heavy thing on George’s desk. Alice looks at it guiltily for a second before picking it up.

‘Hello?’

‘Hi, darling, it’s me.’

‘Hello you.’ Alice stands up as if caught out.

‘What are you up to?’

‘Oh, you know, pottering.’ She glances down at the photo in her hand.

He pauses. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes, of course. Just enjoying my Saturday. How was the interview?’

‘Not bad. Are you OK? You seemed a bit strange last night.’

‘Well, I’d had a strange day. That’s all.’

Alice’s attention returns to the photograph. She picks it up to examine it more closely. George, rosy-cheeked from drinking, is clutching a bottle of champagne in his right hand with his left thrown around Dan’s shoulder. A little out of focus, there’s a cluster of people in the background.

‘Yes, I know,’ George says, more sympathetic than he might usually be.

‘Well …’

Alice wants to wind things up, to be left to her snooping alone. She’s never paid much attention to it before but there’s someone standing next to George, just out of the photo. There’s a sliver of a white shoulder, the strap of a dress and a thin slice of long hair.

Where had Alice been by this stage of the night? She must have been in bed; she’d still been recovering from glandular fever in her first year. She certainly hadn’t made the survivors’ photo. They had never bought one of their own but she’d seen them in the staircases or loos of other people’s houses when they’d all initially made the exodus to London. You didn’t see so many of them now – tasteful black-and-white photos of weddings and children had replaced student snaps.

‘I sometimes think we’re all stuck,’ George says quietly at the other end of the phone.

Alice sits down; this is unusually reflective for George. ‘What do you mean?’ she asks.

‘That what happened to Dan stopped us in our tracks somehow. That we’re all still there – stuck at that time at the end of uni.’ He laughs suddenly. ‘Or maybe I’m just talking bollocks. It’s probably the hangover.’

‘No,’ says Alice. ‘I feel the same.’

She wants him to say more, for this version of her husband to stay on the phone, but then he’s making his excuses, signing off, leaving her with the dialling tone ringing in her ears, the framed photograph still in her hand.

The thing is, she thinks, looking down at the photo, the thing she’d been thinking during the call, the thought she couldn’t fight, is that the hair in the photograph is red, bright red. Maybe she is stuck, but maybe it’s to do with this feeling – which she had even back then but was too ashamed to admit – of being left out; of knowing there was something she wasn’t being told.

Kat

The next time Kat sees Ruth, she is wearing the same ridiculous Pre-Raphaelite dress again, though – Kat can’t help noticing – it is wringing wet. Ruth’s hair is wet too, plastered to her shoulders. She is not wearing a coat, so she might as well be standing in her underwear for all Kat can see, which is black under her white dress. She is standing outside the porters’ lodge looking at Kat as if waiting for her.

‘Haven’t got my fucking keys, have I?’ she says.

Her voice is soft. There is a Welsh lilt to it. She speaks as if she and Kat already know each other, as if they are in the middle of a conversation. You could see why boys might find it seductive.

‘George suggested we go swimming,’ the girl continues, though Kat hadn’t asked. ‘I think he meant skinny-dipping – thought he might see me with my kit off, but I went in fully dressed.’ She barks a short laugh. ‘And when I came out he’d disappeared.’

‘Right.’ Kat raises an eyebrow but says, in a voice that sounds like her mother’s, ‘That’s actually quite dangerous.’

‘It’s OK.’ The girl smiles quickly. ‘I’m a strong swimmer. I love being in the water – it always clears my head.’

‘Still …’ Kat lets the word hang.

‘Haven’t I seen you before?’

‘I don’t know,’ says Kat. ‘Are you a fresher?’

‘Yeah, Spanish. You?’

‘English.’ Buzzing the front door open and stepping in first, Kat holds its weight for the other girl. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Ruth.’ The girl steps after her. ‘Yours?’

‘Kat,’ says Kat. ‘How are you finding it all?’

‘It’s OK.’ Ruth pauses. ‘A bit disappointing.’

‘I know what you mean.’ Kat smiles. ‘No one ever says that, do they?’

Ruth glances at the college clock tower. ‘Do you fancy a drink? I’ve got some Tia Maria.’ She starts to head towards a staircase in the far corner of the quad without waiting for a reply.

Kat finds herself following. ‘I thought first years didn’t get rooms in front quad?’

‘Wait till you see it. It’s tiny.’

Ruth hitches up her dress and starts to climb, her DMs clopping against the wooden stairs, a dripping train in her wake. They climb one flight then another. Kat starts to sweat.

‘Nearly there,’ Ruth gasps as they climb the fifth flight. ‘I start to feel the cigarettes right about now.’

They reach a cramped landing, which can barely fit both of them on it at the same time. The door to the room is small, too. Kat feels like Alice in Wonderland as she stoops. The room is, indeed, tiny with the bed high above on a raised platform, with a wooden ladder cut into it. Ruth has hung red drapes on all the walls and lit the room with fairy lights so that it feels like an enchanted cavern. There are piles of books in every corner and ashtrays balancing on the piles.

‘Come into my lair,’ grins Ruth. ‘Now, I’ve got Tia Maria or … no, actually, just Tia Maria. Will that do?’ She starts sloshing the dark liquid into mugs before Kat has a chance to reply, then flops on a beanbag on the floor, gesturing opposite her for Kat. ‘So,’ she says. ‘Who do you fancy?’

‘Just come out and ask,’ laughs Kat. ‘Don’t hold back.’ But she likes Ruth’s frankness. She takes a sip of Tia Maria and feels the heat of it spread across her chest.

‘I fancy George,’ declares Ruth.

Kat nods, lights a cigarette. ‘He’s got quite the reputation.’

‘Doesn’t he just!’ says Ruth gleefully. ‘How about you?’

Kat thinks of Richard, she thinks of the way he looked at Ruth, and she finds she doesn’t want to draw Ruth’s attention to him.

‘I’m not sure yet.’ She flicks the ash off the end of her cigarette. ‘I got burned by a guy on my gap year,’ she says instead. She glances down at her chipped nail polish. ‘There was this married man. He shagged me, of course, but he wouldn’t leave his wife.’ She laughs. ‘I’m told they never do.’

She’s found that anecdote usually shuts up other freshers. It’s a sort of test. But Ruth looks captivated.

‘Have you slept with many people?’

‘A few.’ Kat takes another sip of Tia Maria. ‘How about you?’

Ruth takes a deep breath. ‘Not one.’ She leans forwards. ‘Do you think it matters? Do you think they mind?’

Kat picks at a bit of grime on her mug. Ruth doesn’t seem to have any sort of filter. ‘God, no,’ she smiles, though in truth the confession was not quite what she was expecting from someone so theatrical. ‘They love it. Being able to show off.’

Ruth adds: ‘I was waiting …’

‘You’re Christian?’ Kat gives her a withering look and then tries to hide it.

‘No, oh God, no.’ Ruth hesitates. ‘I was waiting for my Big Love.’

‘Oh,’ says Kat. It’s not what she was expecting. ‘Your Big Love?’ she repeats. ‘I like that. Me too – I mean, it’s too late to save myself, but I’m waiting for a Big Love, too.’ Maybe she’s found that in Richard. She smiles. ‘You look like Ophelia.’

‘I’m not as mad,’ Ruth grins. ‘Not yet. But if I stay in this bloody freezing dress for much longer, I will be.’

She gets to her feet and starts to pull the dress over her head. Kat, who grew up as an only child in a non-naked house, isn’t used to this sort of stripping. In front of guys, sure, but not like this: staggering around the room with your DMs on. She gets up to help.

‘Are you stuck?’

The dress is made of heavy cheesecloth and it takes an effort to get it off. When it finally gives, Ruth pops out from it like a cork. She flings the offending item down on the floor. Without the armour of clothes, she looks thin and very pale in her black bra and pants.

‘Sorry about that.’ She starts to hunt for her dressing gown, which she finds in a crumpled heap in the corner by her sink. ‘Where are you from?’

‘London,’ says Kat. ‘How about you?’

‘Haverfordwest.’ Ruth’s mouth shapes itself around the consonants.

‘I know that place.’

Ruth laughs. ‘Everyone says that.’

‘I went there when I was eight and it rained.’

‘Yes,’ says Ruth, lighting a cigarette. ‘Everyone says that, too.’

‘What were you like as a kid?’ asks Kat. ‘I bet you looked like Anne of Green Gables.’

‘Ha! I did,’ says Ruth. ‘With the same temper.’

‘I don’t believe that,’ says Kat politely.

‘I guess you haven’t known me very long,’ says Ruth, trying to blow smoke rings. ‘I broke my sister’s arm once when we were little.’

‘What for?’

‘I thought she was cheating. At Grandmother’s Footsteps.’

‘Well, it sounds as though she deserved it,’ Kat laughs.

‘No,’ says Ruth, suddenly serious. She grinds her cigarette out, gets up to deal with her dress in the sink. ‘It was the most terrible thing I’ve done. She screamed and screamed. It was awful; I couldn’t make her stop. My mother said: “What have you done to your sister?” She shook me so hard, and all the time Naomi’s face was scrunched up and muddy from where I’d pushed her over. And I was still angry with her for screaming so loud. For bringing my mum over. I didn’t know whether to comfort her or push her over again.’ She pauses to hang the dress up on a coat hanger. ‘So I ran away and hid for hours in our treehouse.’

‘Ah.’ Kat isn’t sure how to respond to this story. ‘You were just a little girl.’

‘Sure,’ says Ruth dismissively. ‘But, you know, the worst thing is: I actually meant to hurt her. And then it was so dreadful when I did.’ She sighs. ‘She was such a good little girl, as if she felt she had to make up for all my naughtiness.’ She is quiet for a moment. ‘I don’t feel about anyone in the universe like I do my sister. Have you got siblings?’

‘No.’ Kat thinks of her mum’s quiet flat with just the cats for company. ‘But I have a couple of younger cousins.’

‘So you know what it’s like then?’ says Ruth, not unkindly.

Kat nods, but she isn’t sure that she does. Not really. ‘Why did you choose St Anthony’s?’ she asks.

‘I like places on the edge of the world,’ says Ruth, gesturing theatrically. ‘All the universities I applied to – St Andrews, Edinburgh, Exeter – were near the sea. I grew up on the coast. Being by water always makes things better.’ She takes a breath. ‘How about you?’

Kat takes a gulp of Tia Maria. ‘Mainly to get away from my mother.’

Ruth looks at her for a moment and then roars with laughter, leaning over to clink her mug to Kat’s. ‘Amen to that. I mean, I love my mum, but …’

‘I know,’ says Kat darkly.

‘My mum gets sad,’ says Ruth, getting up to put on some music. ‘We grew up in a hotel and there were days when she wouldn’t want to serve the customers. Not that I blame her for that. Or days when she wouldn’t leave her bedroom, where she would sit at the window for hours and look at the sea.’

‘Yes, my mum’s depressive too,’ says Kat. She hates thinking about her mother, especially these days: the way the antidepressants had bloated her, taken off her edges.

‘My mum’s father – my grandfather – walked into the sea one day and never came back,’ Ruth says matter-of-factly as Kate Bush begins to sing. ‘My sister and I nearly got lost at sea once, too,’ she adds, swaying slowly to the music. ‘But that was just an accident. A riptide pulled us out. It was really frightening: one minute we were standing to our waists in water. Then it was to our shoulders,’ she gestures, making a performance of it. ‘And then the sand seemed to slip away completely. Waves kept coming so hard that we could barely catch our breath between them.’

Kat frowns. ‘It sounds pretty hairy.’

‘I thought, “This is it,”’ says Ruth. ‘That we were going to die together like in Mill on the Floss.’ She leaves a dramatic pause. ‘But thanks to a couple of dog walkers, we didn’t, in the end,’ she concludes cheerfully. ‘After that, our father made sure we had swimming lessons. Really good ones, with one of the lifeboat guys who …’ She is interrupted by a dull gonglike clang of metal hitting metal outside.

‘What the hell was that?’ Kat asks.

‘Someone out in Cathedral Square,’ says Ruth, gesturing with her cigarette towards a tiny window above her bed. ‘Some people find it hilarious to fuck about with the anchor out there.’ She climbs up on her bed and looks out of the window. ‘Hey, Kat, look at this.’

Kat climbs up the ladder and sits next to Ruth with her nose pressed up against the cold glass. ‘What is it?’

‘Down there.’ Ruth taps her finger against the pane, and Kat sees George and Dan lumbering back to college, each with an arm slung around a girl.

‘Hmm,’ Kat says and pulls away from the window. She sits cross-legged on the bed. ‘Maybe not your Big Love …’

‘No,’ Ruth smiles but her voice sounds flat. ‘Maybe not him.’ She glances to where her dress is dripping by the sink.

‘I can’t believe you went swimming in October,’ says Kat sternly. ‘It’s actually really dangerous.’ Everyone knew how the town had almost been wiped out by the sea in the great storm of eighteen-something. ‘It’s actually called St Anthony’s because of all the fishermen who were lost here,’ she adds.

‘I know that,’ says Ruth chirpily. ‘There’s a rhyme: St Anthony, St Anthony, bring what I’ve lost back to me.’

‘I’m just saying,’ says Kat. ‘Be careful. It’s dangerous.’

‘Don’t worry,’ grins Ruth. ‘It won’t happen again.’

Naomi

Where we were from, people disappeared into the water from time to time. Once it was someone we knew – a man who used to drink at the hotel bar. I was around thirteen, Ruth fifteen. The wind was particularly wild that afternoon, filling our raincoats and puffing them up like balloons. As we headed back home along the clifftops, the hum of the search helicopter began to follow us and eventually we caught sight of it, hovering like a fly, skating the gorse bushes as it moved. When it passed we could see the face of a man squatting by the open door.

‘Maybe they’ve come for us,’ one of us joked weakly. But we both knew that the world felt slightly different from how it had that morning.

Later, men in fluorescent jackets appeared at the hotel with their walkie-talkies crackling. Our mother was asked to interrupt service to find out if anyone had seen anything. She had taken off her apron and washed her hands to make the announcement.

Speaking carefully, slowly, she said: ‘A man has gone missing. He left home this morning with his wife’s dogs: two collies. He told his wife that he’d be gone for an hour. The three of them haven’t been seen since.’

‘The dogs wouldn’t have left him, if he’d fallen.’ That was the general conclusion. He might have left his wife, but the dogs wouldn’t have left him. People knew about such things where we grew up.

‘It’s the first thing all the diners said,’ Ruth told me later, back in the kitchen. ‘And, you know, they wouldn’t.’ She started picking the dough out of a bread roll, but lost enthusiasm for it and put it back in the basket. ‘A man on his own – I mean, he’s not exactly a target.’

‘What do you mean: a target?’ I asked, but Ruth ignored my question.

‘Maybe he had an argument with his missus,’ Damien, the chef, shouted from behind the hotplate. ‘Or maybe he was still pissed from the night before …’

‘But if you were going to disappear, why would you take your dogs? Wouldn’t you leave them?’ Ruth asked.

‘And you couldn’t travel on a bus or a train with two dogs without people noticing,’ I pointed out, feeling very grown up.

‘Exactly!’ Ruth said with relish.

She loved a mystery. Our father got us into Agatha Christie and we would watch Joan Hickson in classics like 4.50 from Paddington or They Do It With Mirrors on Sunday nights. It’s about imposing order on disorder, they say – the love of a murder mystery, of a Sherlock Holmes story. I don’t know about that but I do know that the memories of piecing those puzzles together as a family are some of my happiest. My father pacing up and down the room, listing the clues off on his fingers as Ruth and I shouted things out.

The day after meeting the supermarket psychic, as I think of her, I wake with Jacques, our Jack Russell, curled into a comforting knot next to me. Carla is up, singing cheerfully. She has a lovely voice, low and tuneful. Before living with a therapist, I might have imagined them to be rather serious people, but Carla lives life lightly.

In the kitchen, she is cracking eggs into a frying pan. Recently, she has started cooking breakfast, insisting the three of us are properly fed before work. ‘Rough night?’

‘Yeah, I think it must have been that nutter yesterday.’

‘The same dream?’

‘Yes.’ I put the kettle on. ‘I can’t believe it’s been fifteen years.’

She touches my belly. ‘You’re bound to be thinking of her at the moment.’

When we were scrolling through donors at the Danish sperm bank where we found the father, we had talked about choosing a redhead, someone who might keep the memory of Ruth alive in some small way. We decided against it, though – it felt too strange and I’d be carrying those genes myself anyway, as my mother pointed out. In the end, we opted for a dark-haired, dark-eyed father to match Carla’s colouring. Not your stereotypical Scandinavian. I wonder, though, if the child might end up looking like Ruth in any case. All sorts of unexpected things can happen in families.

‘I don’t want to forget her,’ I say now.

‘No one is asking for that.’ She puts a warm hand on my cheek. ‘Ruth will always be with you.’

It’s a gorgeous morning. The sky is a singing blue and a cobwebby frost thaws out in the garden. The cold air stings my lungs. It’s not a long trip to the tube and I’ve timed it right, I notice, as I grab a paper and glance down the platform – there are fewer people around, I’ll probably get a seat.

The train comes in to South Ealing from Heathrow, scooping up travellers. One, tall and pale as a ghost, sits with a bulging rucksack at her knees. A couple of other women, who are small, perhaps Spanish, are deep in conversation. I listen for a moment. No, not Spanish, Italian. One of them, with an owlish though not unattractive face, wears a hat perched on the back of her head. The other has dyed hair and a strange bald patch behind one ear. The women, I think – it was always the women for me. But I know there is another reason why I watch travellers so intently.

I don’t look at the paper until a few stops into the journey, after my hands have warmed up a little. And there he is on page four. He has put on weight, is greying at the temples, but there’s still a smirk playing on his lips, as if he’s enjoying a private joke with himself. I stare at his photograph for a long time and think of his hands on my sister all those years ago. Then I turn the page, so I don’t have to look at him any more.

Alice

Today Alice has been feeling, not bad exactly, but a bit strange, as though her body chemistry has shifted, realigned. How much did she drink last night? She’d shared half a bottle of Merlot with George, which wasn’t much by their standards, even these days. And they’d had a fairly early night. So what could it be?

Her colleague on the next desk slathers her arms with moisturiser as she trills on the phone. The smell, rich and musky, seems stronger than usual – Alice finds it oddly repellent. Bile rises from her stomach and she swallows hard.

She looks back at the screen. She had been thinking of Naomi, Ruth Walker’s sister, who had been in her year at St Anthony’s. She had been – still was – exceedingly pretty, with her huge dark eyes and olive skin. A history of art undergrad, she was gentler than her sister, less intimidating. Alice had liked her. They would bump into each other in the college bar and say, ‘We must have that coffee.’

But Alice had become busy with the full-time job of being George’s girlfriend and Naomi had fallen in with a different group, so the moment had passed. And later their gossipy exchanges became greetings and then nods, a raised hand across the quad. Alice suddenly felt sad. Had she been right to put all her eggs in one basket from the beginning, not to strike out on her own, to make George’s life hers?

A thought occurs to her. She logs into Facebook and types ‘Naomi Walker’ into the search engine. The right Naomi Walker appears straight away. She hasn’t changed her name. Alice can’t really remember Naomi with boyfriends at college. Maybe she’d just been picky. Facebook asks Alice if she wants to befriend Naomi and, before she has time to think about it, she puts the cursor over ‘Add Friend’ and clicks the mouse.

‘It’s the man of the moment.’ Alice is jolted back to the room.

‘I’m sorry?’ Alice definitely feels odd today.

‘Your hubby,’ says her colleague breathlessly.

George sometimes had this effect. And there he is, pacing towards her, with a wide smile and brandishing a bunch of sunflowers.

‘George?’ says Alice sharply. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’

‘I thought we could go out for lunch,’ says George, striding over and giving her shoulder a squeeze and her colleague a conspiratorial wink. ‘Can’t a chap surprise his wife from time to time?’

‘Well, yes, he can. But I think this is the first time you’ve been here since the Christmas party. In 2010.’ She adds mentally: where you drank too much and flirted outrageously with one of the interns.

‘What’s this?’ George gestures at her computer screen with the sunflowers.

‘Oh, nothing.’ Alice hastily minimises Naomi’s beaming face. ‘Did you say you were going to take me out to lunch?’ Her voice sounds unnaturally bright. ‘What a treat! Where are we going?’

The restaurant is packed. City workers flushed with lunchtime wine – sleeves pulled up, ties loosened – lean towards each other in privately bellowed conversations. It is too hot, too loud. By the time they’re seated, Alice has lost all enthusiasm for lunch; she doesn’t really want to be here at all.

‘Do you want wine, darling?’ George asks, reaching for the list.

‘Better not.’ Alice glances down at the menu. ‘I’m feeling a bit off today.’

Behind George, she notices a mother trying to nurse her baby. Even with a discreet napkin over her shoulder it’s an incongruous place to breast-feed. The woman’s face has the distracted, half-there expression of new motherhood.

‘Maybe you’re right.’ George drops the wine list as quickly as he picked it up. ‘Are you OK, darling?’ He is being peculiar. Oddly attentive and fidgety.

Alice frowns. ‘George, what’s going on?’

He sighs, brushes a hand across his face. ‘Look, I’ve got something to tell you.’

‘Oh.’

‘That girl you mentioned the other night?’

Before he says it, Alice has a sense of déjà vu: she knows, has always known, that this is the thing coming back for them.

‘I have a confession to make: I did know her. We had a sort of thing in my second year. Way before I met you.’

‘A thing?’ says Alice sharply.

‘Well, a fling thing. Yes.’

‘So you lied.’

He shakes his head, adamant. ‘No, not a lie. It wasn’t a lie.’

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘You said you didn’t really know her.’ She looks at his face, right at him.

George drops his gaze to the table. He picks up a knife and puts it down again.

‘It wasn’t important,’ he says quietly. ‘And I didn’t really know her.’

He had made her look stupid again. And in front of their friends. Teddy would have known. Teddy and George knew all of each other’s secrets from college.

‘How long were you together?’ She sounds shrill. The woman breast-feeding looks up. Alice lowers her voice. ‘Were you in love with her?’

George frowns. ‘A matter of weeks, really. No, it wasn’t serious. And it was a long time ago.’

Alice closes her eyes. He’s right, in a way. Why is she so worked up? But she imagines the looks exchanged between George and Teddy, the undercurrent of understanding. The feeling is like running her finger along an old scar – sensitive but not painful exactly.

‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’

‘I was embarrassed. I didn’t treat her very well and we fell out. And then, of course, when what happened happened …’ He trails off.

‘And what, George? You didn’t want to be associated with a missing person? A possible suicide. Because what? It might reflect badly on you?’

George looks at her. He is pulling his honest face, one he does particularly well for the television cameras.

‘Look – our fling was ancient history by then. It wasn’t relevant. It’s not relevant now. But I know you’ve got a bee in your bonnet about this girl. And once you’d done some digging, you might have found out.’

‘So you’re telling me because I might have found out.’ Alice’s fingers curl around the paper napkin on her lap, scrunching it into a tight ball. ‘Nice one, George. That’s brilliant.’ She is angry now. ‘Was she there?’ she demands. ‘On the night of the memorial ball? With you, I mean.’

George looks completely baffled. ‘Darling, what on earth are you talking about?’

‘There’s red hair in the photograph.’ She hadn’t meant it to come out like this.

‘What?’ George rubs his forehead.

‘In that photo of you and Dan, on your desk, there’s a redhead on the edge of the photo. Was she there?’

‘No,’ says George adamantly. ‘No. God knows where she was that night. Not with us. She couldn’t stand me.’

‘Why couldn’t she stand you?’ Alice can feel the bile rising again. ‘Why?’ she demands again.

There is no stopping it this time. Alice grabs her bag and coat and heads for the door. She makes it outside just in time to throw up in a window box.

She is still holding the napkin as she walks away from the restaurant. Alice wipes her mouth and fishes around in her handbag for her mobile and a mint. She’d known, somehow, from the moment she’d seen the girl on the train that George had been involved with her. She pushes the mint to the side of her cheek with her tongue. What else had she missed? She tries to call Christie, but the answerphone picks up.

‘It’s me,’ Alice says. ‘Call me back. There’s something I need to talk to you about.’

She thinks next of Teddy, whose hand occasionally strays to her thigh under the dinner table, giving it a ‘friendly’ squeeze. He owes her a favour.

‘Al!’ He picks up immediately, sounding, as he always did, pleased with himself. ‘What’s up?’

Her voice comes out thin and formal: ‘Teddy, hi. I’ve got 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 loses her balance, crashing against the flimsy partition.

‘For fuck’s sake, George,’ giggles a girl’s voice that sounds like Ruth’s. ‘Do be careful with me.’

‘That wasn’t my intention,’ George chuckles.

The partition creaks as they push up against it, kissing. Kat shifts her legs away so that Ruth won’t be able to recognise her shoes.

Very close to Kat’s head, George grunts. There’s the sound of a zip.

Ruth giggles again. ‘We’re all wrong on paper, aren’t we?’ she says.

‘All wrong.’ George’s voice gets muffled in her hair.

More shuffling. The ceramic clunk of the toilet seat closing, the creak of George sitting down.

The noise of the music reverberates through the floor. There’s the sound of another zip being undone, more kissing. Kat doesn’t want to hear her friend have sex. She gets to her feet as quietly as she can. Somewhere on the landing a door slams, and the gust of air makes the bathroom door fan open and close again.

‘George,’ Ruth says and her meaning is unmistakable. ‘George.’

His voice is thick. ‘Are you OK?’

‘Could we take it more slowly?’

‘More slowly …’ He says the words ponderously.

‘Yeah.’ Ruth’s voice sounds small.

Kat feels a stab of empathy for her friend.

‘I thought you were different.’ The twinkle has gone from his voice. ‘More adventurous.’

‘I am.’

He sighs. ‘OK. Do you want to go back down? Because I left the party for you.’

‘How generous of you.’ Ruth is trying to make light of it.

A zip coming up.

‘George.’

‘Look, Ruth, I know where this is going.’ There’s a rearrangement in the cubicle’s choreography: Ruth moving off his lap, George getting to his feet. ‘First time, you want it to be special … blah blah, candlelight and music. That’s OK, that’s fine. Go and do that with someone else and then come back to me when you want a proper fuck.’

‘George.’ Ruth sounds as if she has a knot in her throat. ‘Why are you being such a prick?’

George chuckles, back to his cheeky self again. ‘That’s just who I am. You must have heard.’

The bolt of the door slides open and George is gone. Kat hears Ruth lock the door and there is a moment, as they both sit there, breathing, when she thinks she will say, ‘Ruth, it’s me. I’m sorry.’ When she thinks she will repeat Richard’s words: ‘He is an unspeakable cunt.’ But then there are footsteps and the sound of laughter, and Ruth is up and out of the cubicle and a girl’s voice is saying, ‘All right, Ruth?’ And Ruth is saying, ‘Yes, yes, just a bit too much wine,’ and the other girl laughs and then there’s the sound of the tap, the hand-dryer, footsteps.

Kat waits until the girl has gone into a cubicle herself before she returns to the party. She sees George before she sees Ruth. He is near the drinks table with Dan and after a couple of moments there’s a burst of laughter from their direction.

Ruth is on her own, hiding in the far corner of the room, drinking in a determined fashion. Her glance keeps flitting back to George. He has his back to her. As Kat makes her way over to Ruth, picking her path delicately through the crowded room, she notices one of Ruth’s hairs is streaked across the shoulder of his dinner jacket.

‘You’ve got to stop looking at him,’ Kat says quietly when she gets to Ruth. ‘What happened?’

‘It went wrong.’ Ruth stares into her wine glass.

‘How do you mean, it went wrong?’

‘I lost my nerve.’ Ruth looks down at her feet. There’s a red line where her shoes have dug into her skin.

‘He didn’t want to wait.’

Ruth shakes her head. ‘I don’t think he …’ she begins, then corrects herself: ‘I think it’s now or never.’

She glances over again. George’s group has been joined by a couple of girls. One, in a particularly arse-skimming dress, has started to talk to him.

‘Do you want it to be special?’ Kat asks. ‘Because it probably won’t be. With him.’ She takes out her cigarettes and offers Ruth one.

‘I know it’s not a grand romance, but I do like his spirit.’ Ruth’s voice sounds plaintive. ‘I like making him laugh.’ She takes a gulp of wine.

‘For me, I just wanted to get it over with,’ Kat says. ‘I mean, it’s uncomfortable however you do it, so why not do it quickly?’

Ruth nods. ‘I shouldn’t say this, but I can say it to you …’ She lowers her voice. ‘I feel like when I’m with George, people notice me.’

‘You’re daft.’ Kat shakes her head, catches Richard’s eye from the other side of the room. ‘People notice you all the time anyway.’

Ruth takes another slug from her glass. ‘I guess I hate to lose.’

One of the girls talking to George keeps touching her hair, gathering it up and dropping it down one shoulder, exposing her bare neck to him like a willing vampiric victim.

‘I want another shot at it,’ Ruth says. ‘It was just a false start.’

‘OK,’ Kat says.

Richard’s hair is messy, as usual. He’s carrying a book in his hand.

‘I don’t want to be needy and clingy and girlish,’ says Ruth, emphasising the last word. ‘I want to be equal. I want to be powerful. I want to be free.’

‘OK,’ says Kat again, wondering if Ruth should ease up on the wine.

‘I want,’ says Ruth definitively, ‘not to be a virgin any more.’

‘Go and tell him.’ Kat gives her a push. ‘Not all of it – maybe just that last bit.’

George is still talking to the other girl. Their heads are close together as Ruth approaches; his hand is on the girl’s forearm, as if to keep her attention. Ruth makes her way across the room towards them and stands for a few seconds, her face flushing while George ignores her. Kat wonders for a moment if she will give up on her mission – wonders, too, if Richard is watching as Ruth says, ‘Excuse me,’ to the girl, takes George’s hand and leads him off, as Kat will hear later, not to the bathroom but a more private store room, where things go better the second time round.

Naomi

In the mornings our father smelled of aftershave and soap. When we woke, he’d be up already, starting his paperwork downstairs, but his scent lingered in the corridors of the hotel behind him. Our father was tall, with silvering auburn hair. He wore bow ties with his suits so as not to be like other people. It was embarrassing. He also wore leather shoes that clicked on the pavement as he walked.

‘That’s the sound of a real man walking,’ our mother would say. ‘I do like a man with proper leather shoes.’

‘And a bow tie?’ we would ask.

‘Hmm,’ replied our mother.

She always sounded less sure about that.

Our father’s car was an Aston Martin with a personalised number plate, which was the most embarrassing thing of all. The Aston smelled of clean leather seats, as if it were still new. It purred along so close to the ground that we couldn’t see over the hedges. The world looked different through the windows of the Aston. It didn’t win our father many friends.

‘You win some, you lose some,’ our mum said of the car.

She drove a battered but sturdy Volvo without a personalised number plate. In her car, we would sit in the back, pushing our fingers through the guard to touch the dogs’ wet noses. They weren’t allowed near the Aston Martin.

But in the evening, the leather shoes and suit were gone, replaced with corduroys and old jumpers with patches on the elbows. He would do odd jobs in the hotel garden when he could – mow the lawn, build bonfires – and he smelled of wood smoke and beer when he came to kiss us goodnight. The rough texture of his jumper tickled us as we sat up in bed to hug him. He wasn’t the best at bedtime stories – it wasn’t really his thing. Our mother was better, revealing tantalising snippets from Gone with the Wind or acting out the narrative of operas with doll’s house dolls – though not Madama Butterfly (‘it’s too sad’). Our mother had to be careful about things that were sad.

Our dad was good at sums and puzzles. Horses and riding. Dogs. Swinging us high in the air. Long walks on the windy clifftops. Our mother was for tummy aches and baking cakes and singing. She’d sing in the hotel bar on open-mike nights – never for long, just a couple of songs, which she’d murmur into the microphone with her eyes closed, her hair messy from a night’s waiting in the restaurant.

The men in the bar would look at her face carefully then, as if they were looking at the sun. ‘A rare beaut,’ our father used to call her. ‘You’re my rare beaut,’ he would say as he stood behind her in the kitchen and wrapped his arms around her, and she would smile and say, ‘You’re silly. Isn’t your dad silly?’ But she would look flustered, as though she liked it really.

The men who drank in the hotel never really forgave our father for stealing our mother – I think that’s the way they saw it. They called him a spiv. Ruth dared me to ask our mum what it meant and I knew, even as I asked, that it was an ugly word – something we should have looked up in a dictionary rather than saying out loud. Our mother’s fingers touched the corner of her apron, squeezing the material in a ball for a second.

‘Where did you hear that?’

We had heard the word in the bar, from the mouth of Dai the Poet, a camp, overweight man in his fifties, with drama school enunciation and a nasty turn of phrase when he was drunk.

‘What does it mean?’ Ruth asked.

‘It means people are jealous.’ Our mother let go of the apron, brushed it down and looked away.

Of the many things our father was good at, making money was the one that attracted the most attention. It was his gift. He could see opportunities where other people couldn’t; he could crack through the sums; he could glance at the restaurant or the bar and know, more or less, how much they would take that night or what they could do to make more. He had turned our grandmother’s Pembrokeshire hotel from a bohemian labour of love into something profitable in just eighteen months.

‘He came from nothing,’ the posh men would whisper in the bar. Like that was a bad thing: to create something from nothing.

‘He’s not even from here,’ the locals would say. As if that were the final insult: that he had whisked away their most beautiful girl, made heaps of money and, worst of all, he didn’t even have the decency to be Welsh.

The bar was full of tribes – the rich men who’d made their money early in life or inherited and come out to live on the coast; the locals who’d cram the bar on Fridays and Saturdays; or the holidaymakers whose drinking tended not to be bound by which day of the week it was – but our dad didn’t belong to any of them.

Instead, we made a tribe of our own: Ruth and our father with their red hair, my mother and me, with our dark eyes. Neither parent had much tolerance for tales, though we never gave up trying to embroil them both in the ongoing battle of the halfway line, mainly in the car, where it existed as an imaginary border that separated Ruth’s messy side from my neat one.

There were just eighteen months between us. We witnessed the very first moment we met on cine film, a silent movie in muted colours. Ruth, clutching Nunny, her pink toy rabbit, in our grandmother’s arms at the front door, had stretched out to greet our mother as she came back from hospital carrying me in a large white blanket.

‘Baby,’ mouths our mother in the film, tilting my face, peeking through the blanket, towards Ruth.

‘Baby,’ repeats my sister, climbing out of our grandmother’s arms to join me, heedless of the halfway line even then.

Alice

February 2016

It has been three weeks since Alice had approached Naomi on Facebook and had no response – three weeks, too, since the doctor had told her unequivocally that she was pregnant. The news had come as a shock to both of them: Alice wonders now if perhaps they had started getting used to the idea that they couldn’t – or wouldn’t. George had leaned heavily against the kitchen counter when she’d told him. He was quiet for what seemed like a long time. Eventually, he had said, ‘Oh! darling, that’s wonderful,’ and come over to where she was sitting at the kitchen table to embrace her, pressing her face against his stomach.

A baby. A person made up from George and her. Alice tries hard to think of what such a person might look like and finds she can’t picture it, can’t imagine how George’s strong features might be combined with her more delicate face. Lying in bed, she puts a hand on her stomach. Since her sixth week when she found out she was pregnant, she has been feeling extremely unwell indeed. She’s had to take weeks off work and finds herself staggering around the house from the bedroom to the loo. It is not quite the euphoria she imagined. The sickness makes her feel light-headed, depleted. She has fitful dreams often set in St Anthony’s, with Dan there too, and other people she hasn’t seen for years. But the dreams are so vivid, so clear, it feels as if no time has passed at all.

When she feels well enough to get up, she wanders down to George’s study. She trawls the internet looking up people on Facebook, searching for Ruth’s face. In a weak moment, she decides to order Richard Wiseman’s book but she clicks through too quickly and finds she has sent it to her work address. On a well-worn trail, she tends to return to George’s desk, to try the drawers in case. Just in case.

Yesterday, a particularly bad day, she picked up the photo collage on his desk and looked at it again. It took her a moment to realise, but the photos seemed to be in a different order from when she last saw them. She rubbed her eyes and looked again. Yes, they’d been changed around. Her eyes returned to the photo of George and Dan, and it seemed smaller, as if it had been cropped. Alice traced her finger around the edge. The red hair had disappeared. It had been cut away.

She had called Christie to talk about it but found she couldn’t quite bring herself to say it out loud. Perhaps she’d wait to see her in person. Instead, she said, ‘Did you know Naomi Walker is pregnant, too? I noticed on Facebook.’ It had been something a mutual friend had written, tagging both Naomi and Alice in the post.

Christie paused. ‘No, I hadn’t heard.’

‘It just made me think,’ said Alice, playing with the cord of the house phone. ‘It just made me think that if Ruth were still alive, it might give her a reason to come back.’

Christie had been silent for a long time. She has been quite short with Alice recently. Maybe she just thinks Alice is being a wet blanket. Christie efficiently pushed out three bouncing boys without any fuss and was back to work within six weeks of the last one’s arrival.

‘Don’t you think, darling,’ she said, ‘that you’re being weird about this?’

What had she been like before she met Christie? Alice tries to focus. She had always thought of herself as, if not mousy exactly, someone who had to try rather hard. She had started college a term late because of glandular fever, which had lingered for months after her A levels. By the time she arrived, other freshers had separated into clusters. She’d had to make up for the lost months. So she was grateful to have happened upon Christie, who had the bedroom above her and invited her up one morning for coffee. Sitting there, as Christie fussed over a compact Italian coffee machine, Alice noticed the Post-it notes on the wall above her desk: ‘Fit not fat’ and ‘You can always do better’. And while part of her shrank from the blatant ambition, another part admired it. Was this what it took to improve oneself?

Alice and Christie weren’t alone in striving in that way. Alice recognised the signs in other girls: grey smudges under their eyes, the way they pushed their food around their plates in formal hall, watching the men, watching the other girls, measuring up the competition. Alice spent her days measuring, too: measuring her waistline, measuring time, calculating hours left in the library or minutes on the rowing machine in the college gym.

There was always so much to be done. There were cocktail parties and yoga classes, ballroom dancing, rowing, the library – always the library, armed with lists of books so long that she would feel a lump in her throat when they were handed to her in tutorials.

Alice observed how Christie took care of herself: her manicures, her glossy hair. Christie, she noticed, never drank too much. She sipped her drinks, put them down for long stretches of time, and seemed to listen intently to other people without saying a huge amount herself. Despite not having the obvious charisma of other, more show-offy girls, Christie’s cool self-possession and dry wit meant friends flocked to her, but for some reason she chose Alice, of all people, to be her closest confidante. ‘I can tell we’re both alike,’ she said that morning over a cappuccino. ‘I think we know the value of things.’

One afternoon, after Alice had fallen into bed with a handsome rugby player and was feeling rather dreadful following his retreat, Christie had popped down to see her. Surveying the dark room, Christie had pulled the curtains open, drenching it with light. She’d perched on the end of Alice’s bed and said crisply: ‘I don’t want to lecture you, but they don’t stay with the ones who sleep with them straight away.’

‘It doesn’t sound very modern,’ huffed Alice.

‘It isn’t,’ Christie agreed. ‘But it works. Especially with the rugby boys – they’re the worst. Or you can just muck around, have fun.’ She made it sound like a bad thing. ‘It’s up to you, of course, but did you have fun? Really?’

Alice thought of the previous evening – the flush of flirtation over cocktails, the initial rush of excitement, yes, but with sweatiness, disappointment, the prickling of embarrassment hot on its heels.

‘My mother says these are the years,’ said Christie.

‘The years for what?’

‘Finding the right person. We’ll never have it as good as this – never again be surrounded by so many bright young men.’ She looked hard at Alice. ‘Do you know Magnus? The only decent hairdresser in town. He’s da bomb.’ Christie had the unfortunate habit of trying to pep up her rather conservative way of speaking with occasional street lingo. It didn’t really work.

Alice put a hand to her hair. ‘No, I don’t.’

‘I’m going to take you to see him. He’ll sort you out. My treat.’

As she sat in Magnus’s chair, her hair falling from her in drifts, Alice suddenly felt unspeakably sad, as if she were being shorn of her old self; as if pieces of her childhood were falling away from her. She closed her eyes.

‘It’s going to be so worth it,’ said Christie from behind her, reading her mind. And, strangely enough, she was right. Alice emerged from the salon as if from a chrysalis. Her brown hair became a short blonde bob, framing her eyes and making her look neat, in charge and altogether less mousy.

‘We need to get you some clothes to match,’ Christie said. ‘Let’s start with a dress.’

That night, in her new Karen Millen dress, George, in his final year, noticed Alice for the first time. It was not a style Alice would have normally gone for, with a bodice in turquoise and a hot pink skirt, but it attracted the eye, as Christie put it, and emphasised her tiny waist. It cost her a serious chunk of her student loan, but it was worth it for the reaction it got. In between making eyes at George, she calculated how she was going to live for the rest of the term. She’d certainly have to work through the holidays.

At the end of the night, George walked her back to her room, but she allowed him only to the bottom of the staircase.

‘So, which one’s yours?’ He smiled, looking up the stairs.

‘You’ll see.’ She smiled back. ‘Maybe.’

His mouth looked sulky for a moment; he took a step closer to her.

‘But it would be fun to see it now.’

Keep it light, Christie had said.

‘Yes, but it’ll be something for you to look forward to.’

Alice stepped closer too, glanced up through her eyelashes at George.

He reached for her hand, his eyes glassy, unfocused. It wasn’t quite how she’d imagined it. Standing on tiptoes, she kissed his cheek for a second, inhaling the whisky and aftershave smell of him, then turned quickly and trotted up the stairs.

‘Anna, come back!’ George had called after her petulantly. ‘Anna!’

‘No,’ she shouted back. ‘And it’s Alice.’

Naomi

She always had a temper. She broke my arm as a child – an accident, of course: I’d been cheating at Grandmother’s Footsteps and she pushed me too hard, misjudged her own strength.

Then there was my first boyfriend, Jamie Havers. A boy with brown hair and freckles. He used to follow me around Pony Club Camp when I was eleven. I liked him, but I didn’t want to kiss him, so he stopped talking to me and told the other boys I was frigid. It made me cry.

The day after he dumped me, Ruth asked the boys if she could join in with their game of touch rugby. I remember it was a hot August day and being outside all week had tanned the boys’ noses. Mrs Jenkins, who was in charge of looking after the children at camp, was wedged into a deckchair outside her caravan, keeping an eye on everyone and watching the game.

Ruth considered the scene for a bit and then approached the biggest of the boys. ‘Can I play?’

He squinted down at her. ‘There aren’t any other girls playing.’

‘So?’

‘Let her play,’ said a cheery dark-haired boy who was friends with Ruth.

She hung back at first, running for the ball but not trying too hard. She was biding her time for when Jamie got hold of it, which he did before too long. He was a good player, tenacious and nippy. But Ruth was faster. As he ran for the try-line, she began to give chase and just before he reached it, she caught the edge of his T-shirt in her hand and gave it a yank so that he fell, stumbling, to the floor. Then the pair of them were wrestling for the ball, rolling over and over each other. It got so vicious that the other boys started jeering and even Mrs Jenkins sounded panicked as she heaved herself up from her deckchair to disentangle them.

Ruth came out of the tussle wild-haired, with a scratch down her face, but she laughed off any fuss from me. ‘It’s just rugby,’ she said. ‘Just a fight for the ball.’

Where we were from rugby was a religion. The bar didn’t have a telly – Grandma wouldn’t hear of it – but the locals would gather afterwards to discuss the game. Everyone had an opinion on it.

We knew our father was different, though: he didn’t care as much for rugby as other men did, but he had to pretend. He was proud of the differences he’d chosen – the bow tie and flashy car – but there were ways in which he wanted to be the same, wanted to fit in with the posh crowd. Loo not toilet, lunch not dinner, long-sleeved shirts not short. There was so much to remember and apart from the voice, the slight flatness of his vowels, you’d almost never have known.

‘What do you think about these changes to the scrum rules?’ he asked one day in the bar after a game, cribbing from a newspaper article he’d just read.

‘It’ll make it harder on the pitch. Not that you’d know.’

It went quiet, the hum of conversation dying down for a moment the way it does in films. Dai the Poet had been drinking in The Swan all day. His hands looked swollen on his glass as he handed it to our mother for a refill. No please or thank you.

‘What do you mean?’

Our father wasn’t as drunk as Dai – he didn’t drink like that – but he’d had a couple of beers and you could tell, if you knew him well, when he was about to lose his temper: a quick tightening of the mouth, which Ruth inherited, a change in the focus of his eyes.

Dai’s laughter came out like a breath. ‘Not a game you played at school, I imagine.’

Our mum, with Dai’s glass in her hand, paused for a moment before filling it.

‘Where was that again?’ Dai said. ‘Your school?’

Our father ignored the question. ‘I played rugby at school,’ he said shortly, looking away from Dai as the lie came out.

He never talked about his childhood. And you could see that Dai – I never knew why they called him Dai; he sounded as English as they came – guessed, too, and that it was a test.

When the glass she had been holding shattered on the tiles, our mother didn’t do anything to clear it up, just looked at Dai steadily: ‘I remember coming to see you play rugby.’ She glanced at our dad. ‘He wasn’t very good.’

Later, chopping avocados in the kitchen, she said to us: ‘Public school boys. They are soft on the outside and hard on the inside.’ She held up the stone of an avocado. ‘Be careful of them, girls. They seem so polite, so courteous …’ She paused, looking for the words. ‘I don’t know what those schools do to them.’ She didn’t usually speak to us like that. As if we were already grown up. ‘And the worst thing is,’ she added, looking sadder than I’d ever seen her, ‘he wants to be one of them.’

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