The Dinner Guest by B Walter (best short books to read txt) 📕

I go over and kneel down on the other side of the table. ‘Yes, I remember them,’ I say. ‘They were lovely.’ I lightly touched the matte-finish of one of them – a photo of me when I must have been fourteen or fifteen, having just won some rugby game, Archie and me holding our hands in the air. It feels like I’m looking at a different person. A different life.

‘Well, I was sorting some things out and discovered these, and ended up having a look through them,’ my mother continued. ‘When I decided to put together the display, I needed to get a good range, and since the both of you have straddled the era of film and digital, it took some organisation to get shots from different points in your life. I asked Edith for a load of photos of Matthew and, well, you know how disorganised she was; she just gave me heaps of old photo albums and a load of SD cards. I think she didn’t want to go through them all, since there’d be photos of Collette in there. She said she didn’t mind pictures of Collette and Matthew being up at the wedding, but I can understand why she didn’t want to go through them herself.’

I watch as she carries on laying out the shots. ‘And you never gave them back before Edith died?’ I ask.

‘Oh, I did,’ my mother says. ‘All the albums and SD cards, but I had the contents of the SD cards printed, so I kept those. I spent ages looking through reams of holiday snaps and family gatherings – shots of the Jones family. Shots I think Collette took, or had taken by others, before she died. And … here.’ She pulls out a photo. It shows a group of young people aged around nineteen or twenty. They’re standing in the snow, surrounded by pine trees. ‘They’re all on holiday, somewhere cold,’ Cassandra says. ‘There’s a hotel sign in one of the other shots. And look there. Right there. It’s her.’ I scan my eye across the people standing, smiling at the camera in the snow. I look along the faces and vaguely recognise some of them; they’re Matthew’s friends, mostly posh left-wingers who lament how terrible things are for the poor and the evils of carbon emissions whilst jetting off for a few weeks on the slopes.

The face in the middle is at first oddly familiar. Then the penny drops.

‘Oh fuck, it’s her,’ I say, dropping back to sit down on the carpet properly. It is indeed her. It is Rachel. Staring back at me from a photo that must have been taken a good decade ago.

‘It is indeed. With Matthew. I think they’ve been skiing.’

And now I know what this is. And where it is. And how it all fits into place. ‘Yes, I see. I see that.’

My mother starts to gather up the rest of the photos as I continue to stare at Rachel’s face. It feels like I’m holding a slice of Matthew’s history. A time I’ve only properly imagined in my head, almost like a bizarre, surreal film.

‘Don’t you think it’s strange?’ my mother says, putting the lid on the box and staring at me. ‘All this time, Matthew claimed not to know her. You both acted like you didn’t know her.’

There’s a note of suspicion in her voice now. As if she suspects Matthew told me everything before he died.

‘Darling, we both know Rachel didn’t kill Matthew. Your father is right; you’d better tell us what happened so we can deal with it before the police work all this out.’

I close my eyes for a second, that slightly hot, burning feeling of tiredness spreading through my face. Then I hear a noise, someone moving, then seconds later feel my mother’s hand on my shoulder. ‘Come on, tell me,’ she says, ‘sit up on the chair and tell me, properly, who Rachel is.’

A few beats of silence pass between us, then I hear another voice – the resonant, deep voice of my father. ‘Her real name is Rachel Holden.’ I open my eyes, and my mother and I turn to look at the door where my father is standing. ‘She’s Titus’s aunt.’

Chapter Thirty-Five Charlie

Less than a week to go

I suppose, looking back now, there were many times when I could have interrupted and told Matthew that I knew everything he was telling me, that I knew about the whole situation with his sister. Her boyfriend. Titus. How he’d told me everything one cold autumn day in Kensington Gardens when we’d started to become a couple. But of course, he hadn’t told me everything. Just the bare facts, with no real detail of what happened. Of what he did. So, sitting on the sofa in the dim light of the lounge, the evening darkening at the windows and turning into night, I didn’t stop him or press him to get to the heart of the matter. I just listened, and allowed the truth to change our lives for ever. About how Collette had met Johnny Holden when she was at university as a one-night stand who’d turned into a relationship. How he supplied her and her friends with drugs. And how it quickly escalated from cannabis to MDMA and cocaine. Until eventually, Matthew and his mother intervened, sent her to a rehab clinic, and tried to convince her to leave Johnny for good. But, of course, that didn’t quite work.

I sat, watching my husband standing there, tense and strung out, and got the sense we were arriving at a moment we’d always been destined to reach at some point. It was as if the world was changing before my very eyes. Things I’d regarded as certain, although unexplored, were exploding off into new avenues of unsaid truths and downright lies. An energy was burning through me – an energy that made me want to seize Matthew and shake the