Page 45 of Seven Reasons to Murder Your Dinner Guests

Six months later

Vivienne

Opening her eyes, Vivienne gasps when she sees Tristan standing in the corner of her bedroom, leaning lazily against her wardrobe.

Deep breath, deep breath. Blinking several times, she scoops up her glasses from the bedside table, puts them on, and looks again.

It’s just her old blue cardigan, draped haphazardly over the wardrobe door.

Tristan is gone, she reminds herself. He’s gone .

And yet she sees him all the time, feels him sitting on her floral duvet; her dreams are filled with him.

Standing in the rain when they met for the first time, sobbing into his hands when he spoke of his panic attacks, and looking into her eyes as they dropped together into the water.

Sleep overcomes Vivienne once again, and she allows herself to be tossed around by her dreams. Now she’s stroking her own pregnant belly. Now she’s shoulder to shoulder, laughing, with Melvin. Now she’s feeling Tristan’s hands squeeze her elbows on the bridge…

“Are you awake, Vivienne?” Cat whispers, her head peeping around the bedroom door.

“Yes, just about,” she croaks and then smiles as Cat walks in with baby Angharad on her hip and a cup of tea in her other hand.

“Drink this, and then we should start to get ready. Ziggy’s coming to pick up Angharad at nine,” Cat says, sitting on the bed and handing the baby over to Vivienne. “If you’re sure you’re up to it.”

“I am. A cuddle with this one, and I’m ready for anything,” says Vivienne, with a confidence she does not feel.

“Did you sleep much?”

“A little bit,” she says, bouncing the baby on her knee, who giggles with delight. “Still having those dreams, but the doctor said that’s normal.”

Cat nods and smiles distractedly at them.

Vivienne takes in the dark circles under her eyes, the look of worry that hasn’t left her face in the last six months.

She hates that she put Cat through all of that when she was heavily pregnant.

Vivienne can’t remember much at all from that night.

She remembers holding on to Tristan on the bridge.

But that’s it. Cat has since told her that someone walking along the embankment had seen them go under and alerted the Thames Coastguard.

Vivienne was found quickly and rushed to St. Thomas’s Hospital, where she was treated for brain hypoxia and pneumonia.

That week in the hospital passed in a haze of delirium: lucid dreams and brief moments of wakefulness slugging it out, with dreams usually emerging victorious.

When she was finally awake long enough for a conversation, Cat informed her that the coastguard hadn’t found Tristan that night, but they’d seen him struggle and slip beneath the water.

“The doctor said you might suffer memory loss, but can you remember anything about what happened?” Cat asked.

“Tristan had a panic attack and wanted to jump off the bridge… I tried to stop him…” Then Vivienne turned her head away from Cat and pretended to fall asleep. It was only once Cat’s visit had ended that she let the tears come. Tristan was gone, and she’d failed to save him.

Toward the end of her hospital stay, a woman appeared by Vivienne’s bed.

“Your doctor has suggested that you experienced a dissociative fugue state on the bridge,” she carefully explained, her fingers playing with the wooden beads around her neck.

“As if you traveled out of your body for a while. I wondered if this was something you’d experienced before in moments of extreme stress? ”

Vivienne’s heart hammered against her chest: Mur-der-er…

Mur-der-er… No! She might have suffered a fugue state afterward, but she remembered what had happened with Tristan that night.

She’d tried to save him. So she shook her head and reassured the woman that it had been a one-off, unwilling to go into all that.

Once the woman left, Vivienne’s mind drifted back to her very first fugue state, when she was aged eighteen and had just given birth.

Cat takes Angharad off her, and Vivienne sips her sugary tea, still feeling an ache in her elbows where Tristan had gripped her all those months ago.

If only she’d been strong enough to save him.

Six months after they’d gone into the water, Tristan’s death certificate was issued and his mother, Susan, set the date for his funeral.

“You don’t have to go, you know, if it’s going to be too hard,” Cat says, tears already rising in her eyes.

“Ole waterworks,” as Vivienne sometimes still calls her—once critically, now affectionately.

Back at the magazine, she’d seen Cat’s regular tears as a weakness, as a means to show her (male) colleagues she couldn’t cope, a signal that she was bowing down to their superiority.

Now Vivienne sees those assumptions as signs of weakness in herself.

Cat is one of the strongest women—no, people—she knows.

Her tears show her empathy, her heightened sense of the pain of others. What is weak about that?

Once Vivienne had been released from the hospital, Cat insisted on staying in the loft room, right up until she went into labor.

Vivienne will never forget the night when Cat woke her, actually relieved her from a terrible nightmare, to say that she had to get to the hospital.

They called a taxi and met Ziggy there. Just two hours later, a baby girl with a thick head of brown, curly hair arrived.

They named her Angharad (Welsh for much loved , which had been Vivienne’s suggestion, and made her think of Melvin).

Since the birth, Cat and Angharad regularly stayed over, utilizing the cot Vivienne had had set up in the loft room.

“I love you, Cat, but I do have to go. You don’t, though.

Why don’t you stay at home, have a quiet day with your family?

” She touches Cat’s wet cheek with the pad of her thumb, not wiping her tears, just touching them, letting them soak into her own body, hoping Cat’s strength will help her through the day.

“You’re my family. Drink your tea, and I’ll make some breakfast,” she says.

***

“I didn’t know Tristan was religious,” Cat whispers as she and Vivienne walk slowly toward the church.

Vivienne is wearing her long-sleeved woolen dress, black tights, boots, and her warm coat, and already she’s sweating.

This spring has been unseasonably cold, but the sun is out today, just when Vivienne would welcome dark clouds and drizzle.

Maybe Cat was right: Maybe she isn’t up to this.

But how could she miss Tristan’s funeral?

“No, Tristan wasn’t, but his mother is,” Vivienne replies, remembering him laughing about his parents dressing in their “Sunday best” every week: “As if God cares if Dad had stubble on his chin or Mum had a set and blow-dry.”

The village is oddly familiar, perhaps because it’s just like a Christmas card.

The low stone wall lining the road; the modest little church with its proud steeple; ancient, mist-covered gravestones on one side, like soldiers waiting for battle.

A small group of people is gathered under the arched doorway (where Vivienne pictures giddy newlyweds posing for the camera).

But this group is not here to celebrate new love.

“Let’s just wait here for a minute,” Vivienne mutters, pulling Cat back from the church entrance.

“You’ve got nothing to be ashamed of,” Cat tells her. “You have every right to be here.”

But Cat does as Vivienne asks, and they stand together at the churchyard entrance, allowing mourners to pass them and file into the church.

“Did you reply to Ian’s message?” Cat asks, not one to allow a funeral to get in the way of matchmaking.

“No, but I will. He wants to cook me a vegan curry,” she says, trying to keep a smile off her face.

“Well, I think you should let him,” Cat tells her, meeting her eyes.

“Maybe I will,” Vivienne says with a shrug. “Time to go in.”

She can’t let on to Cat, but she has been wondering if she’d dismissed Ian too quickly. He’s been so kind since the accident, sending flowers and regularly calling to check on her.

“Vivienne, thank you for coming.” Tristan’s mother is suddenly in front of them, like a castle guard or nightclub bouncer. Her sand-colored hair forms a perfectly permed helmet, the deep-purple arch of her eyeshadow matching the large flowers on her busy floral dress.

“Susan,” Vivienne stumbles, words spilling out. “I-I’m so sorry for your loss. It was such a tragic accident.”

“Yes, it was,” Susan nods, avoiding Vivienne’s eye.

During that hazy week in the hospital, Susan regularly appeared at Vivienne’s bedside, desperate for answers.

Some days she was dripping in tears, a vision of grief; other days she was dry-eyed and quarrelsome, bearing an arsenal of questions.

Vivienne and her muddled mind did their best, but so often Susan left dissatisfied with her vague responses.

A panic attack, a cry for help, a struggle, and a fall.

“He’s never had a panic attack in his life,” she snapped at Vivienne several times, and Vivienne thought of how sad it was that Susan didn’t really know her son at all.

Stepping inside the church, Vivienne’s body temperature cranks up another few notches.

The overwhelming scent of lilies hits her in the face as they walk down the aisle.

White lilies and peonies are bunched together at the end of each row, making Vivienne think of a wedding for the second time.

Neither Vivienne nor Tristan had ever been married, had known that feeling of being joined to another person by law, teammates for life.

Well, that’s how it’s supposed to go. Yet, in their own way, they were joined to each other.

Joined by their matching loneliness at first and still now by secrets that Tristan took—and Vivienne would take—to the grave.