What is going on is that I have lost my wife, my Emma, and gained in her place a stranger called Emily Peel. Although, in this moment, I don’t even have Emily Peel.
The streetlamp across the road from the Rothschilds’ house glows brighter as darkness creeps.
‘OK.’ Jeremy says. ‘I’ll tell you what I know. But only Emma can tell you exactly what happened, and why she did the things that she did. Some of them I can understand, others I don’t think I ever will. But, for what it’s worth, here’s my side of the story.’
PART II
EMILY
Chapter Thirty-Two
EMILY RUTH PEEL
Twenty years earlier
The night we met was like something from a film, Jill said at the time, but it’s hard for me to look back on it as anything more than a sordid night of student drinking.
Jill and I found him lying on a pavement on the Kinnesburn Road, at around 6 p.m. He was surrounded by his friends, who were laughing hysterically. ‘Dickheads!’ he was shouting, as if his friends were responsible for the fall. I doubted they were. He looked drunk; they all did. I thought they must be postgrads: they were at least ten years older than everyone else.
We gave them a wide berth because we’d already decided they were fools, these overgrown boys with their all-day drinking and attractive faces, but he caught my eye and begged me to help him because his friends wouldn’t, and we ended up getting drawn into their gang and drinking in the Whey Pat until closing time.
It was around nine, maybe ten, when Jill cornered me. ‘How do you do it?’ she whispered in my ear. Her breath was damp and gin-fumed. ‘They’re eating out of your hand, but you’re not even trying. Damn you, Emily, share your secrets!’
‘They’re not eating out of my hand! Don’t be ridiculous!’
Jill went off to wee, muttering about taking lessons.
I realised she wasn’t entirely wrong when I returned to the group. A fight broke out about who was going to sit next to me, and, without any conscious plan to do so, I found myself leading a conversation that had everyone in stitches.
The ability to charm strangers is one of many things you learn as a military child. You need to be fearless and funny when you start in a new schoolroom – and there are many new schoolrooms – but you also need to seem as if you don’t care at all.
I didn’t really know any other way of being. Not then.
Jeremy came up to me at the bar when it was my round. ‘Sorry,’ he said, with the sort of indulgent smile that suggested he wasn’t sorry at all. ‘Pack of beasts, aren’t they?’
If anything, I’d say he was proud of them. He looked oddly familiar, I thought, but I couldn’t quite place him.
There was Jeremy, there were two Hugos – ‘fat Hugo’ and ‘twat Hugo’， a Briggs and a David. Jeremy told me they’d graduated ten years ago but came back annually for a ‘boys’ weekend’。 He told me he worked for the BBC, in London. He was attractive and obviously intelligent. Unlike his friends, however, he wore his brainpower lightly: I rather liked him.
Jill and I drank hard. Jill was rolling out her foulest language, which was how she flirted – her secret weapon against girly girls. She spent a lot of time with one of the Hugos, but when he started chatting up a waif in a deerstalker, she barrelled off to talk to Briggs.
They flirted with me, too, but only one seemed determined to win. I felt his eyes on me, watched him dispatch his competitors one by one, and by midnight we were sitting above West Sands in the velvet darkness, hands inside each other’s clothes, the unseen sea pitching in and out. I told him what I was going to do to him later, and in that moment I entirely bought this version of myself.
He left my house at 6.45 in the morning. ‘I’ve got to get back to London,’ he said. ‘Train’s at 7.45 from Leuchars and I don’t even know where the others are.’