Spread Eagle. She came up to me at the bar and asked me to buy her a drink, while you were off fuck knows where. I bought her a drink and she put her hand on my arse and gave it a squeeze, then she slipped a piece of paper in my jacket pocket and told me to call her if I got bored.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Yes,” he said quietly, “you do believe me, because you know what she’s like.”
I rubbed my cheek angrily with the back of my hand.
“Come here,” he said softly, pulling me into a hug. “Don’t cry. It’s okay.”
He held me gently with both his arms around me, my head nestled in his shoulder. His fingers ran through my hair, combing it away from my face. “You don’t need to be scared, Catherine. You shouldn’t be scared. It’s this crazy job. I’m no good at showing how I feel, I get stressed and angry and I forget who I’m talking to. I’m sorry if I scared you.”
I pulled back from him so I could look in his eyes. “What if I’d called the police, Lee? What if I told them what you’d done?”
“Most likely, they might send someone by to take a statement, then it would get filed and nothing else would happen.”
“Really?”
“Either that, or there’d be a prolonged internal investigation and I’d lose my job and my pension.” He stroked a finger across my cheek, wiping away the last tear. “I’ve got something for you,” he said. “I want you to have it, no matter what.”
It was a ring, inside a black velvet box. A platinum ring with a big diamond, glittering brilliantly in the sunshine. I didn’t want to touch it, but he pressed it into my hand. “I know it’s a rocky start for us,” he said, “but it will get better, I promise. In a few months I’ll look for a transfer, something a bit less stressful, something that means I can be at home more. Just please say you’ll think about it. Catherine? Will you at least think about it?”
I thought about it. I thought about what I would have to do to stop him hitting me again; about being home on time, about telling him if I went anywhere without him, about wearing what he told me to wear and doing exactly what he told me to do. “All right,” I said. “I’ll think about it.”
He kissed me then, in the bright sunshine, and I let him.
I’d always thought that women who stayed in bad relationships must be foolish. After all, there had to be a moment, a realization that things had taken a wrong turn and you were suddenly afraid to be with your partner—and surely that was the moment to leave. Walk away and don’t look back, I always thought. Why would you stay? And I’d seen women on television, interviewed in magazines, saying things like, “It isn’t that simple,” and I’d always thought yes, it is that simple—just leave, just walk away from it.
In addition to that moment of realization, a moment that had already passed for me, there was a new realization that walking away wasn’t a simple option after all. I’d tried it and made the mistake of inviting him back. Being still in love with him, the gentle, vulnerable part of him that was still inside somewhere, was only part of it: it was also the dreadful fear of what he might do if I did anything to provoke him.
It wasn’t about walking away anymore. It was about running.
It was about escape.
Saturday 2 February 2008
It was sunny and almost warm, so we got the Tube down to the river and walked along the South Bank until we were too tired to walk anymore. We sat on a bench outside Tate Modern and drank hot tea out of disposable cups. It felt like the first day of spring.
“When I came to see you at the hospital on Thursday, I thought I saw someone I knew.”
“Lee?” he asked.
“No. Someone else. Sylvia.”
Stuart leaned forward on the bench, his head turned to me. “Who’s Sylvia?”
I’d been thinking about this ever since Thursday: telling him. Thinking of how I could explain it.
“She was my best friend before all this happened. She moved to London because she got this amazing new job.”
“You lost touch with her?”
I nodded. “Well, it was more than that, really. She didn’t believe me. When things started to go wrong with Lee, I tried to tell