The Confession by Jessie Burton

Author:Jessie Burton [Burton, Jessie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Published: 2019-09-18T18:30:00+00:00

25

I kept thinking about the way Connie called herself a ghost. Up until this point, I’d considered that the only ghost in this house was Elise Morceau. Connie had, for reasons known only to her, opened up to me about her childhood – her father the army officer, who she idolized, and who would probably be diagnosed with PTSD if he was around now; her mother, who Connie claimed as the mistress of detachedness. Her brother Michael and his children: absent. And above all, I suppose, the fact of how her sexuality, and therefore her self, had been passively erased by those closest to her. What she’d done by talking to me – it felt like friendship, I suppose. An offering, given in trust. I glowed with the honour of it, and my heart ached for the young woman Connie once was, who felt she couldn’t be herself. I wondered if those feelings of alienation and the need for detachment had continued into her adult life as well, and I suspected they might have.

I had come to Connie’s with a clear intention, but now it felt my path was muddied and uncertain. As much as I wanted Connie to share herself with me, hoping that in doing so she would either deliberately or inadvertently bring me nearer to my mother – the vulnerability she had displayed underneath that urbane, intellectual toughness was making me feel guilty and protective. Perhaps I should just be here to look after her, I thought. Perhaps I should just focus on the woman who is here, and not the woman floating around in my head?

*

By the morning of Christmas Eve, Kelly was well entrenched in the English countryside, no doubt chopping logs. I loved the image of her with her swelling stomach, splitting dead trees with an axe. I was in the living room of our flat, wrapping all the presents for Joe’s family, tying them with excellent bows. I’d done my best to get nice things – body lotions and bottles of wine, a face cloth for Daisy, with apparent magical exfoliating properties that she’d probably take as an insult – but none of them were particularly special. My shoulders ached from leaning over on the carpet, trying to get neat lines on the parcel wrapping, in case Dorothy suspected, correctly, that this was all last-minute. My plan was to go up to Connie’s, give her her present (which I had spent considerable time on and was pleased with), stay for a glass of champagne, then leave her to it. This had been what she’d indicated she wanted. Then I would go down to Wimbledon to spend Christmas with Joe and his family.

Joe had gone for an early Christmas pint with a new friend of his I hadn’t met. His name was Charles, apparently, and he was very influential on social media in the London food scene.

It felt like more than one pint. Eventually, the front door opened and Joe wandered into the living room.

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