That was what hurt the most. Whilst she had been clinging on to the plans she’d made for their future together once she was back home, he had been working out how he might get rid of her for good. Who had he talked to? How many of their friends knew he was planning to leave? Perhaps they even felt sorry for him – poor Dominic, standing by Rose because she’s too broken to abandon. She could hear them now, twittering at the dinner parties she had missed, the drinks dos that Dominic had attended without her whilst she’d been stuck in Suffolk.
‘He’s trapped, you know. Apparently, the whole relationship had run its course before she killed that boy, but then she had the breakdown and there was nothing Dom could do but sit it out and wait for her to get better so that he could ditch her.’
‘But it’s been months.’
‘Indeed. As I say, poor Dom.’
Maybe that was it? Had he only stayed until he was sure she was stable enough not to harm herself? Pip couldn’t believe he’d think like that. At no point since the accident had she been suicidal. But did Dominic know that? She wasn’t sure he knew her at all.
‘Pip, sweetie, are you all right?’ her mother said, interrupting her thoughts. She laid a hand gently on top of Pip’s and the touch of her skin brought Pip back to herself. They were still sitting side by side, jammed together with nowhere to move. Suddenly it felt too close. Pip needed to get out, to create a space round herself, to bring down her own personal forcefield to protect herself. She shuffled forward on the sofa until she could stand up and escape.
‘I’m okay,’ she said. ‘I think I’ll go upstairs. I just need to . . .’
Without elucidating further, she slipped from the room. She felt as insubstantial as a waft of smoke, as if she were so fragile it would just take one sneeze and Philippa Rose Appleby would be gone.
‘Shout if you need anything,’ she heard her mother call after her.
Pip took the wooden steps to the first floor two at a time, barging into her room and banging the door shut behind her just as she had done many times before; so many stairs flounced up, so many doors banged. Sometimes it felt as if the last ten years of her life, what she had become, what she had achieved, had all just melted away. No one here really understood her life as a barrister. Her father was as much in the dark about what she did as her mother. She had once heard him telling someone that she defended murderers for a living, his chest puffed up as he spoke and his eyes casting round the room, making sure everyone was listening to him. She had lost count of the number of times she had tried to explain that there were different kinds of barristers and that neither she nor any of her colleagues were involved with criminal law. To start with, she had been frustrated that her father took so little notice of her other life, her real life, that he couldn’t explain it properly to others, but when she had seen the look of pride on his face as he recounted the particulars to the enquirer she had had to reconsider. Did it really matter that the details were muddled as long as the main points were correct? Her father was proud of her life in London, even though he didn’t understand it. Wasn’t that enough?
What was there left for him to be proud of now? Who was she any more? No sharp suits, no strutting in and out of the Inns of Court, aware of ordinary people watching her and wondering how important she was, no status-enhancing boyfriend with all the trappings he had brought with him.
A life for a life.
Now all the trappings were gone, she wasn’t sure what was left. She had always defined herself by what she did rather than by who she was, by what she wore on the outside instead of what was happening on the inside. Status had shaped each part of her, moulding her into what she had become. So where did that leave her now it was all gone? Drifting with neither rudder to steer her nor anchor to hold her safe. It was terrifying.
Pip climbed into her bed, but instead of burying herself beneath the covers she propped herself up against the headboard and stared at her childhood, preserved shrine-like in this room. She felt eerily calm. In the space of six months, every aspect of a life she’d thought was secure and stable had collapsed or evaporated. So why wasn’t she crying? Where were the howling tears of anguish, the breast-beating and lamentations that she might have expected to follow such a catastrophic turn of events? Her eyes were dry. Apart from a pivot towards the philosophical, which had taken her by surprise but was not upsetting in itself, she felt fine.
But that couldn’t be right. She must be in shock or something, or maybe her precarious mental state had rendered her incapable of processing what had just happened. It was true that feeling numb had become something of a habit with her recently, but this felt different. This wasn’t a lack of emotional engagement due to trauma, like before. This was something closer to acceptance. Pip probed her emotional depths and found that she was okay. In fact, she was more than okay. She actually felt relieved. She now knew exactly where she stood. With Dominic gone from her life, there was absolutely nothing left.