The Girl Before

One of the strange things about grief is the way it ambushes you when you least expect it.

Never apologise for someone you love, he says quietly. It makes you look like a prick.

Please make a list of every possession you consider essential to your life. I take a deep breath and pick up my pen.

People like to talk about clean slates. But the only truly clean slate is a new one. The rest are gray from whatever’s been written on them before.

I have no time for people who don’t strive to better themselves.

But one day, when Toby is old enough, I will take down a shoe box from a shelf where it is kept, and I will tell him again the story of his sister, Isabel Margaret Cavendish, the girl who came before.

I realize something. I haven't had a single flashback or panic attack since I stepped inside the house. It's so cut off from the outside world, so cocooned, I feel utterly safe. A line from my favorite movie floats into my head. The quietness and the proud look of it. Nothing very bad could happen to you there.

I feel a thrill of excitement at this first tiny glimpse of self-revelation, of intimacy.

There was a mountain of grief to be climbed, and no amount of talk would help me up it.

One of the curious aspects of a traumatic experience like the one you’ve been through, she says at last, is how it sometimes results in a softening of your existing boundaries. Sometimes the changes are temporary. But sometimes the person finds they actually quite like this new aspect of their personality, and it becomes a part of them.

He was heartbroken, I say. Heartbroken, he repeats. Of course. That's the great myth Edward Monkford's spun around himself, isn't it? The tormented genius who lost the love of his life and became an arch-minimalist as a result. You don't think that's right? I know it isn't.

Grief, I discovered, feels not so very different from defeat. And

Sometimes it's as if I can shrink away to nothing. Sometimes I feel as pure and perfect as a ghost. The hunger, the headaches, the dizziness—these are the only things that are real.

Life is simply too short to live it less perfectly than it could be lived.

But it never really occurred to me to ask myself whether this was what I wanted too,

Of course I was already familiar with that saying by Mies van der Rohe, Less is more, but I hadn’t appreciated before just how sensual less could be, how rich and voluptuous.

Oh, hasn't he told you? The ones before. None of them last, you see. That's the whole point.

That feeling I used to have of playing to an invisible audience has been replaced by the consciousness, the ever-presence, of Edward's discerning eye; a sense that the house and I are now part of one indivisible mise-en-scène. I feel my life becoming more considered, more beautiful, knowing that he considers it. But for that very reason, it becomes increasingly hard to engage with the world beyond these walls, the world where chaos and ugliness reign.

In my art history degree course, we did a module on palimpsests—medieval sheets of parchment so costly that, once the text was no longer needed, the sheets were simply scraped clean and reused, leaving the old writing faintly visible through the new. Later, Renaissance artists used the word pentimenti, repentances, to describe mistakes or alterations that were covered with new paint, only to be revealed years or even centuries later as the paint thinned with time, leaving both the original and the revision on view. Sometimes I have a sense that this house—our relationship in it, with it, with each other—is like a palimpsest or pentimento, that however much we try to overpaint Emma Matthews, she keeps tiptoeing back: a faint image, an enigmatic smile, stealing its way into the corner of the frame.

You say just, Ellis says flatly. There is no just with Edward Monkford. Nothing's more important to him than getting his own way.

I'll tell you something that was unusual, though. When most people are caught lying to the police, they cave in pretty quickly. Emma's response was to tell another lie. It might have been planted in her head by her brief, but even so that's not a common reaction.

We're all connected now, I think as I send it off into cyberspace. Everyone and everything.

Saul is as different from Simon Wakefield as it's possible to get, I find myself thinking. And Edward Monkford is utterly different from both of them. It seems incredible that Emma could have had relationships with all three men. Where Simon's eager to please, but also touchy and insecure, and Edward's calm and super-confident, Saul is pushy and brash and loud. He also has a habit of saying 'Yeah?' aggressively at the end of his sentences, as if trying to force me to agree with him.

I know it must look odd, given that I didn't even know Emma. But it seems to me that almost no one really knew her. Everyone I speak to has a different version of what she was like.

That was Emma—she'd have enjoyed knowing she had something like that, something that could blow her whole fucking life and mine apart if it came out. Her little bit of power.

My fascination with letting images repeat and repeat—or in film’s case “run on”—manifests my belief that we spend much of our lives seeing without observing. —ANDY WARHOL

But I see now that our future lies not in building beautiful havens from the ugliness in society, but in building a different kind of society. He

It's the sketch Edward did of me before he went away, the one he said was fine but didn't want to keep. It's as if he's drawn me not once but twice. In the main drawing I have my head turned to the right. It's so detailed, you can see the tautness of my neck muscles and the arch of my clavicle. But underneath or over that there's a second drawing, barely more than a few jagged, suggestive lines, done with a surprising energy and violence: my head turned the other way, my mouth open in a kind of snarl. The two heads pointing in opposite directions give the drawing a disturbing sense of movement. Which one's the pentimento, and which the finished thing? And why did Edward say there was nothing wrong with it? Did he not want me to see this double image for some reason?

But I know he loves me. I know he needs our games, that they answer some deep-seated hunger in him.

Grief, I discovered, feels not so very different from defeat.

And when I realized you had secrets too, I was glad. I thought we could be honest with each other. That we could finally rid ourselves of all the clutter from our past. Not our possessions, but the stuff we carry around inside our heads. Because that's what I've realized, living in One Folgate Street. You can make your surroundings as polished and empty as you like. But it doesn't really matter if you're still messed up inside. And that's all anyone's looking for really, isn't it? Someone to take care of the mess inside our heads?

I don't want anything from you, Edward. If you'd only told me you were still in love with Emma—' 'You don't understand,' he interrupts. 'It was like an illness. I hated myself every second I was with her.

Most people put all their energies into trying to change other people when the only person you can really change is yourself, and even that's incredibly difficult.

If I’d been asked to make a list of what I could do without, I’d never have managed it. But by putting the thought in my head that really none of it’s important, I find myself wondering if I can’t just shed all my things, my stuff, like an old skin. Maybe

The same goes for Edward Monkford. Yes, based on what you've told me, it seems Emma was the real narcissist, not him. But there's no doubting he's an extreme controller. What happens when a controller comes up against someone who's out of control? The combination could be explosive.

people put all their energies into trying to change other people when the only person you can really change is yourself, and even that’s incredibly difficult.

Why are all men like that?’ my answer is ‘Why are all the men you choose like that?

Those who are closest bear the heaviest brunt.

You can make your surroundings as polished and empty as you like. But it doesn’t really matter if you’re still messed up inside. And that’s all anyone’s looking for really, isn’t it? Someone to take care of the mess inside our heads?