after drowning our frontal lobes in Heineken. We could barely look each other in the eye. We didn’t remotely fancy each other and, in the cold light of day, that made it simpler, but also much worse. I’ve never known self-loathing like it.’
I strain to remember any time when I’d come back from seeing Mark, when Susie had been different. I can’t. I remember larking around in that flat, Susie smoking with her arm held out of the sash window. She was seeing people, on and off, but never anyone significant.
With some effort, I remember her once saying to me, uncharacteristically pensive: ‘The thing about you and men, Eve, is you fall very rarely and very hard. I fall often, but I’m over it in a week.’
She must’ve meant Ed – so she fell for him too? Why did she never confess? Did she think I’d explode into a shower of dry leaves? I pick up my glass.
‘You let Hester carry on being friends with Susie, with no idea?’
‘That was utterly shit of me, yes. But I only had shit choices. If I confessed and our relationship survived it, I wouldn’t have been allowed to still be mates with Suze, so RIP our gang. She’s always been messed-up about how close we all are, as you may have noticed. The cost–benefit didn’t seem worth it, and it still doesn’t.’
‘The cost–benefit,’ I say, witheringly. ‘It wasn’t about balancing books. It wasn’t going to benefit you.’
‘No, exactly, who would it benefit? Hester deserves to know the truth, in principle, but it wouldn’t benefit her, quite the opposite. There’s no way of discussing this without sounding terrible, because it was. It was a really gross thing to do and I’m ashamed of it to this day. You want the ugly truth? Well, it’s ugly.’
I’m randomly reminded of my mum and dad arguing over Bill Clinton’s impeachment. My dad saying: ‘You ask a man if he fooled around with someone who wasn’t his wife, he’s going to say no, isn’t he? What man in the world when put on the spot would say: “Ya got me”? I don’t see why him lying was a big deal when anyone in his shoes would.’ My mum replying: ‘He shouldn’t have fooled around!’ My dad: ‘Yes but that’s a “I wouldn’t start from here” when someone’s asking for directions, Connie, isn’t it.’
Am I unreasonable, asking Ed to be better than a president? Ed’s lies have only been omission.
Roger, offstage, slaps at the door on his cat litter box.
‘… I’ve asked myself, apart from alcohol, why I did it,’ Ed says. ‘I’ve never come up with a better answer than “Because I could.” You can’t disown your own character under the influence. Suze used to taunt me for being staid, a lot. I think showing off might’ve been involved. When I realised what she was intending, me feeling I had to meet the challenge and show I could be wild, too. Ironic, given there was nothing to be proud about in what happened, the opposite. I couldn’t have made myself look or feel more ridiculous.’
‘Oh, it was her pushing for it, was it?’ I say, rolling my eyes.
‘As I recall, yes,’ Ed says, looking dog-tired all of a sudden. ‘I can’t be sure, given how drunk we were. But I wouldn’t have dared drag her to the women’s bogs.’
There is, at the heart of this explanation and apology – if that’s what it is – a problem. All this might be true, but the connection I thought Ed and I had – it can’t exist. Or not in the way I thought it did, if he could do this. Anyone but her, the closest human being to me. I weathered the treachery of Hester, as I could follow how it happened. Not this.
‘This isn’t the person I thought you were,’ I say, bleakly. And although, in my head, this wasn’t a killer line, only a spasm of pain that I couldn’t help exiting my mouth, Ed visibly crumples at it.
‘Yes, I know,’ he says. He takes a deep breath: ‘It’s not who I thought I was. Your opinion is everything to me.’
The most difficult part of this for me is upon us, and I have to tackle it, even though it makes me feel like I’m sitting here naked.
‘Susie said in her letter she didn’t want me to know, in particular?’ I hold my breath.
Ed breaks eye contact for a moment and says: ‘She was aware there was