You and Me Read online

  YOU AND ME

  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 HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020

  Copyright © Nicola Rayner 2020

  Cover design by Becky Glibbery © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020

  Cover photographs © Rekha Garton/Arcangel (woman), FotoVoyager/GettyImages (house), Shutterstock (background and sky)

  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: 9780008374594

  Ebook Edition © October 2020 ISBN: 9780008374600

  Version: 2020-08-26

  Praise for Nicola Rayner

  ‘Nicola Rayner has written the new The Girl on the Train, with note-perfect prose and an ending that will leave you gasping’

  Observer

  ‘Nicola Rayner writes like a dream. An engrossing and emotionally honest thriller’

  Emma Curtis, author of The Night You Left

  ‘A tantalising and suspenseful mystery. Absolutely brilliant!’

  Lauren North, author of The Perfect Betrayal

  ‘A haunting mystery with beautifully written characters’

  Jenny Quintana, author of The Missing Girl

  ‘Superbly written … An author to watch with the greatest of excitement’

  The Chap

  Dedication

  For my first friends in the world, Lucy, Sophie and Mark

  Epigraph

  I’ve always been of a determined nature. Patient, they used to call me. I like to see a thing through to the end.

  – Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Praise for Nicola Rayner

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Acknowledgements

  Keep Reading …

  About the Author

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  In the winter, the lake outside his house ices over, and the birds – the ducks, moorhens and even a pair of swans, who come and go like royal visitors – huddle under the weeping willow. But it’s May now, his birthday. When I made my trip this morning, there was a different texture to the air – something silky, springlike. A teasing breeze ruffles the surface of the water; it makes me feel hopeful that things might change.

  I always sit on the same bench by the lake – I’m a creature of habit like that. Apart from the birds, I have the garden to myself. I wait for a long time, thinking about how it began between us all those years ago. His present sits in my lap. I haven’t given it to him yet. I’m not sure I will.

  At our school there was an award called the Back Prize – the winner was someone who excelled at sitting up straight and still and, I don’t like to boast, but I won it three times. As Mrs Morgan, our housemistress, said: ‘Some girls are pretty and some girls are sporty, but you’re good at sitting up straight, Fran.’ If you wait, something always happens eventually, but today I can’t wait for much longer.

  I get to my feet and begin to walk around the lake to the front of the house. I’m always struck by the beauty of it. As if someone created it to be admired. Making my way along the path, I nearly tread on a duck egg, still warm when I pick it up. It’s a shade so delicate it could have been artificially created. The nest is easy to find in the hollow of a nearby tree. I put it back as carefully as I can and say a little prayer that its mum doesn’t reject it when she returns. Babies should be with their mothers.

  Glancing up, I see two small faces peeking out of the nursery window on the first floor. I’m not sure if they’ve seen me and I’m torn, for a moment, between delivering his present and scurrying quickly away.

  1

  It’s merely coincidental I’m there the night Dickie Graham dies. That is what I shall say if they ask me. I never liked Dickie, so, on that matter, I may have to dissemble, but nobody deserves to die in that way. Not even the worst of us.

  There’s no sign, that morning, of what is to come. I wake with Branwell curled up on my bed licking himself and listen to the children next door through the thin walls. It’s too porous, London living – there’s no escaping other people’s sounds and smells: the judder of a neighbour’s washing machine on spin, the billows of marijuana travelling through the pipes from the flat below.

  I have my daily rituals. After feeding Branwell, I say good morning to the photograph of Mother and Ellie. It’s a picture I took of them myself. They’re in Whitby, sitting on what we used to call the halfway bench, the midway point on the steps that run up from the town’s cobbled streets to the Abbey. We grew up in a cottage on the North York Moors, and Mother never tired of our trips to Whitby, dropping in to see the Abbey like an old friend, or popping over to Scarborough to visit Anne Brontë’s grave.

  In the photo, Mother smiles, a faint sheen of sweat on her forehead from the climb, but Ellie looks restless, as if she can barely sit still long enough for the picture to be taken. Mother’s arm is heavy on
my sister’s shoulders, holding her close while she can before Ellie darts off. She was a physical child who always needed to be moving, either running up the steps ahead of us or plunging into the sea, even when the weather was inclement. She’d shiver, wet hair dripping, in the car on the way back. That was before she gave up swimming.

  The next thing I do each morning, if there’s time, is check Ellie’s Facebook page. Since yesterday she’s posted a photograph of her and Rose perched on what strikes me as a perilously high wall for a two-year-old, looking up at the Eiffel Tower, with the caption: Another one off the list for Rose! Paris, je t’aime.

  You can only see the backs of their heads, but the image fills me with longing. Ellie’s hair is the same white-blonde cloud it always was, but Rose’s is thick and brown like mine. Wherever they are, Ellie has a knack of framing the shot perfectly. But she doesn’t post as often as I’d like, and as Rose’s face has developed over the years, from baby to toddler, I’ve missed the tiny, incremental changes.

  Sometimes I wake to find they’ve moved again – another country or even another continent. She never tells me where she’s going next. I just learn through Facebook like the rest of the world. I try not to get too cross about it as I move the bit of Blu Tack on my globe to the new location, to help me imagine where they are.

  When I get to the bookshop, Ingrid and Liam are leaning against the bike railings outside the staff entrance, both smoking and admiring Ingrid’s long legs crossed out in front of her. They barely look up at me as I type the code into the keypad and let myself in. Ingrid and Liam are in their twenties and think they’re better than the job – she’s an actress, though I’ve never known her to go to an audition, and he’s a photographer. He’s not her boyfriend, but he’d like to be. What I think of as the old guard – Gareth, the manager, Brenda and me – we’re different. We’re in our late thirties now. There are certain dreams we’ve given up on. I suppose that’s just part of growing up. I once hoped to be an English teacher, like Mother, but it didn’t turn out that way.

  I still have the chance to talk about literature every day. One of the best parts of the job is introducing the right person to the right book. I like to imagine myself as the bookseller’s answer to Jane Austen’s Emma. Indeed, such is my aptitude for making matches, I flatter myself I’m more successful. Which is why when I overhear a tired-looking man asking Ingrid at the till if she can recommend any books about bullying, I step in. Ingrid has already fobbed him off with vague directions to the Mind, Body and Spirit section by the time I reach him, but I believe I can do better.

  ‘Is the book for an adult or a child?’

  ‘My daughter – she’s nine.’ He shoots me a grateful look, while Ingrid scowls.

  ‘How about Roald Dahl’s Matilda?’ I begin. ‘That’s a good one to start with. Or there’s The Boy in the Dress by David Walliams. I’m guessing it needs a happy ending?’

  ‘Isn’t that comedy?’

  ‘It’s funny, yes, but moving. It’s about a child who misses his mother …’

  ‘My daughter does too.’ He says it so quietly I can barely make out the words.

  I glance at him and notice how empty and sad his eyes look. I have the urge to reach out and touch his arm, which is unlike me.

  ‘She’s shrunk into herself,’ he says.

  I know what that feels like. Sometimes when I wake from a particularly vivid dream, I forget that she’s gone for a moment. Until she became ill, Mother was such a substantial person physically. Solid, dependable, like me. Without her, with Ellie so far away, there are moments when I feel completely unmoored.

  I know what the bullying feels like too.

  We spend quite a long time in the children’s section picking out a shortlist. I have to ignore the occasional ting of the bell as Ingrid tries to summon me to the till. I leave it for someone else to help her. At times like these, I see books as medicine and it’s important to get the prescription right.

  After I’ve made the sale, the man thanks me, raises a hand to his salt-and-pepper hair and hesitates. ‘I suppose you’re tired after your shifts here,’ he says uncertainly. ‘You probably don’t feel like going out at the end of a long day.’

  ‘Usually you’d be right,’ I say, ‘I like to go home and read, but tonight I have plans.’ I smile to myself at the thought and turn to the next customer.

  ‘He was hitting on you,’ Ingrid says after he’s gone. She pulls a face as if the idea appals her.

  I hadn’t realised. Things like that don’t happen to me as often as they do to Ingrid and I’m not good at noticing them. Even if I have the faintest inkling, I’m not sure how to respond, what they expect of me. Anyway, it’s true, I do have plans tonight.

  At home, I get ready with care, choosing an old favourite I picked up from Oxfam – a navy Fifties-style dress that shows off my blue eyes and gives me something resembling a waistline. I dress, as I often do, in Mother’s bedroom upstairs, where there’s more space and a full-length mirror. My own cramped room is on the ground floor, but I’ve never thought to swap. This space will always be Mother’s.

  Ellie and I never got around to sorting it out after she died. We talked about it, especially when Ellie was pregnant with Rose – I suggested she use it as a nursery; Mother would have liked that – and we even went in to do it one rainy Saturday. Ellie opened a drawer in Mother’s desk at random. We both glanced down at what it contained – a couple of batteries, three old notebooks and a packet of out-of-date paracetamol – looked at each other, then Ellie closed it. ‘Do you want to go for a walk?’ she asked and I nodded quickly.

  When I’m ready, I check my reflection in the wardrobe mirror. Not too bad. Still a bit on the large side. ‘Looking hot,’ says a mocking voice in my head as I assess myself. I still hear them sometimes – Dickie Graham or Juliet Bentley making fun of me after all these years. When I catch my reflection in shop windows, looking a little pudgy, or if I say something in a group situation that makes everyone else go quiet, I can hear them chuckling, making clever comments. As if they’re always watching, always judging.

  I close the wardrobe door and check the time. I hope it’s not a late one tonight, but at least it’s not far to go. I don’t have to leave for another thirty minutes, so I choose a book of Romantic poetry from the shelf and sit in Mother’s rocking chair reading it as I wait. I love this chair. When we were children, Ellie and I used to quarrel over it. I’d sit in it, gently rocking and reading, but when Ellie had her turn she would swing to and fro violently, causing it to fall backwards more than once.

  I run my fingers along the scars in the wood as I read. I would give anything to fight over it with her now.

  I manage to shake off my melancholic mood for the rest of the evening, to push away the thoughts of Ellie while I drink and chat and clink glasses like everybody else. I keep my loneliness well hidden. I’ve had lots of practice.

  On my way home, I spot Charles’s face through the crowd on the tube platform. He’s still wearing his work suit. The charcoal one. He’s loosened his burgundy tie a little. He still looks smart, if weary. His blond hair is cropped short now, not long enough to be pushed off his face, as it was at school. It sometimes takes me by surprise when I catch a glimpse of him these days – how much he has changed. I take a step towards him, pleased to have this opportunity, but then I see Dickie Graham is with him and I hesitate.

  At school, Dickie always played the joker, with his broad freckled face and messy brown hair making him look like a Just William illustration. He was the sort of child a teacher dreads in their classroom, lurking in the back row, seeing his purpose there to make fun of everything and everyone.

  Charles, of course, was always different, always kinder, but Dickie’s presence makes me cautious about approaching. Circumstances are against us, in any case. Thursday evening at the time when the world heads home after drinks. It’s twenty past eleven and the platform is crowded, the train delayed. I was about to give up before I saw
Charles, on the cusp of elbowing through the wall of people and making my way home above ground.

  The sight of his face makes me hesitate. Should I wait a little longer? The sign says the next train will arrive in two minutes, but it hasn’t changed for so long that no one believes it. A few more people squeeze on to the platform, and then a few more. They keep coming and, just when you think we’re at maximum capacity, more people filter through. The air down here is warm and stale. I’m not of a panicky disposition but I’m conscious there are too many bodies pushed together, blocking any way out.

  As I give in and start to make my way slowly to the exit, I strain to keep my view of Charles. He always held his drink well. He’s not one to overdo things. Dickie, on the other hand, is swaying gently. I’m far enough away for him not to see me, but in any case he looks distracted, as if his mind is somewhere else. He fishes in his pocket, searching for something, pulls out a packet of cigarettes and glances down at it absent-mindedly. Charles seems to remind him he can’t smoke here and Dickie smiles and pushes it back into his pocket. But it’s a wan, preoccupied smile. Marriage problems, perhaps. It’s possible his wife has seen through him already.

  A group of women begins to trickle in, all sparkly tops and pink lipstick, clutching their programmes for a Seventies singalong at the Royal Albert Hall – shrieking at each other in wine-fuelled tones. They push and shove their way onto the platform. Perhaps they’re out-of-towners and don’t know this sort of crush isn’t normal; that there’s a limit to the number of people the platform will take. Irritated, I continue shuffling my way to the exit, like a swimmer paddling against the tide. Now I’m nearer to him I can see Dickie is still swaying, standing too close to the edge of the platform. That’s Dickie all over – seeing how far he can push something.

  A breeze picks up then – the change in the air pressure warning of the arrival of the train at last. The crowd shifts like water, bodies pressing and pushing against each other towards the edge, where the train will be any second now.

  There’s a shriek of laughter and a hen party, dressed up for the concert with mullet wigs and oversized sunglasses, jostles its way between me and Charles. Close up they smell of alcohol and Chanel, hairspray and garlic breath. As the women push forward, Charles and Dickie hold their ground between the press of the crowd behind them and the rush of the train coming in.