Seemingly satisfied, Agatha returns to her statistics report, which she manages to finish by 10.30 a.m. The team meeting passes without Maggie making any comment on the continued absence of Nigel, and in the middle of the afternoon Jane wanders over to Agatha and me with two mugs of coffee. I am so blindsided by this unexpected gesture of friendship that Agatha jumps in before I manage to say anything.
‘Do you know where Nigel is?’ she asks. ‘It looks like he’s still not come in.’
Jane blinks rapidly. I see her thoughts follow the track mine took the previous day and reach the same swift conclusion that Agatha has no idea what happened on Saturday night, or the part Nigel played in it. ‘I’m not sure,’ she says. And then, unexpectedly, more quietly she adds, ‘Although I think Maggie might know something.’
‘Really?’ I consider Jane with surprise. Maggie didn’t appear to be aware of what had happened to Nigel when I saw her yesterday. However, if she’s since found out something, Jane is bound to be in the picture too.
Jane puts a mug down next to Agatha’s computer, her features perfectly composed. I imagine this is the real reason she came over to our desk, to dangle her superior knowledge in front of us both like a ball of wool, then whip it away the moment one of us reaches out an enquiring paw.
‘I’m not allowed to say anything.’
‘He’s not in any trouble, is he?’ Agatha is staring at Jane with worried eyes.
Jane avoids her gaze and hands me my coffee. ‘Not at the moment.’ Dipping her head she hurries away with small smug steps.
As soon as Jane is out of earshot Agatha explodes. ‘God, Claire! What on earth do you think has happened to Nigel? I hope he’s all right.’
I shrug. ‘I have no idea.’ I couldn’t care less about Nigel. Agatha seems frantic, however. ‘Look,’ I say, at last, ‘maybe Maggie’s just pissed off because he hasn’t reported in sick properly. It could be as simple as that.’
‘Do you think so?’
‘It’s possible.’
Possible, but not, I would say, terribly likely.
At various points of the day I try to get hold of Mark. He still doesn’t pick up. Eventually I leave a message, keeping it brief and neutral, merely asking him to call, ‘so that I can update him on the project I have been working on.’
* * *
By Wednesday it feels as though a board of film censors have combed through my life and painstakingly airbrushed out any aspect that might require an 18+ certificate. Mark still doesn’t return my call, my day in the office is sweetly uneventful and at 9.00 p.m. Angus returns home brandishing a Jo Malone carrier bag that is fastened at the top with a glossy black ribbon.
I get up from the sofa and circle my arms around his back. ‘How was your trip?’ We are standing beside the Spanish mirror; in the glass we look quite cool, quite hip – Angus, tired and slightly dishevelled, and me, bath-fresh wearing a pink cami and pyjama bottoms.
‘Oh, you know…’ he says vaguely, ‘delays, meetings, terrible airline food.’
‘What time did your flight get in? I thought most of them from New York were overnight?’
Stepping free of our embrace, Angus starts to take off his jacket. ‘Like I said, there were delays. Take-off was put back because the pilot fell ill and they had to find another.’ He checks his watch. ‘To answer your question I guess the plane landed about two hours ago. Here,’ to slip his second arm clear of his sheepskin he passes me the Jo Malone package, ‘I bought this for you.’
He watches while I extract a bottle of perfume from its abundance of extravagant packaging and spray a little on my wrist and neck. The smell is ruby-rich and spiced with clove and musk.
I hold out my forearm to Angus, twisting it to offer the paler underside. ‘What do you think?’ I have never managed to find Jo Malone for sale in any airport and consider his present a triumph.
Obligingly he dips his head and inhales. ‘Very nice.’ Instead of straightening up, his lips graze a trail along the length of my arm. They settle briefly on the soft, fragranced skin at the base of my throat and then move to my mouth.
My mother provides the greatest excitement of the week so far by telephoning on Thursday evening, inevitably just as Angus and I are about to sit down and eat.
‘You haven’t forgotten it’s Rob’s birthday on Saturday?’ she asks, as soon as we’ve trotted through the basics.
‘No,’ I say – truthfully, as it happens, because my phone pinged that afternoon to remind me of the impending landmark.
‘You normally come home for the weekend closest to his birthday, so we can all go out together.’ My mother trails the statement like fishing bait, the spaces between each word increasing very slightly.
‘Mum, it’s really busy at the moment. I’m not sure I can get away.’Angus glances up from his plate of risotto as he begins to comprehend the gist of the conversation.
‘That’s a shame, darling. You haven’t been home recently. I know how much Rob would love to see you.’
There is a silence, which I know my mother is quite capable of extending indefinitely. She is a master in the art of keeping quiet to get her own way – regrettably I don’t appear to have inherited the same trait. After somewhere between ten and fifteen seconds of listening to Angus eat, I sigh and say, ‘I suppose I could get a train after work on Friday.’ Seeing Angus frown, I add, ‘Although I might need to get back on Saturday.’
Once the exchange is over I say to Angus, ‘I have to go and visit my family this weekend. It’s my brother’s birthday.’
‘So I gathered.’
‘You were away last weekend,’ I counter.
‘That was work.’ Angus’s face has folded into itself with annoyance. ‘And I didn’t leave until Sunday.’
‘Well, this is family. My family. I haven’t seen them for a while.’Angus doesn’t say anything and I realise I have been quite tactless, given his lack of contact with his own parents.
‘You could always come with me,’ I say, more gently.
He shakes his head with a lopsided smile. ‘I daresay I’ll find something to do to pass the time.’
I half expect him to say more, to mention the gym or tennis or a pub lunch with friends. When he doesn’t elaborate I am suddenly glad to be heading home, back to the familiar territory of unspectacular, predictable Ipswich, and my equally unspectacular, predictable family.
* * *
The Friday evening train is packed. Despite my best efforts to get away in good time it was five when I left the office, which means I am faced with the happy trilogy of peak fares, no seats and a buffet trolley that has run out of hot water for tea and coffee long before it finally reaches me. At least it’s a good excuse for an early gin and tonic, which I drink lodged in the gap between the luggage rack and the loo.
At Colchester there is a general spewing out of passengers onto the platform and the rest of us, bound for the watery rural plains of Suffolk and Norfolk, dive towards vacated chairs with the reactions of sprint runners. I find myself next to the window, the seat cushion warm and adorned with a confetti of crisps.
Although it is too dark to see much at all, the exterior of flat unbroken grey suggests we are passing fields, trees and hedges, the kind of lightless countryside it is easy to forget exists when you live and work in central London. The lack of space means my handbag is on my lap and a small overnight bag is wedged between my feet. Every so often the woman who is half-asleep in the space opposite murmurs an apology when she crosses or uncrosses her legs, kicks the bag and mistakes it for my foot. After a while, I check my phone, because that’s the obvious thing to do on a train when the only possible source of an endorphin rush is an electronic device. There is a text from Angus, sent only a minute earlier.
R u back tmrw or Sunday?
I consider my ghost-faint reflection in the glass for a moment before replying. It doesn’t seem worth spoiling the relative tranquility of recent days for the sake of another night in Ipswich.
&nbs
p; Tmrw, I type.
Immediately my mobile pings again. I am smiling as I look down, anticipating Angus’s reaction, but the grin dies on my face.
For the first few seconds the shock of the words displayed on the screen is too great for me to make any sense of them. They jump and pop in random patterns, emitting fireworks of alarm even though I can’t actually manage to read the complete message. Even when the letters finally settle into sentences – three quite short sentences – I still have to study them to lift any meaning from the WhatsApp message.
Playing about again? You’ve gone too far this time. Stop right now if you want past mistakes to stay in the past.
I let my hand fall to my lap and stare at the black blanket of nothing sweeping past the window. My heart is pounding in time with the roll of the train, as if they are racing in tandem down the track.
I try to reason rationally and ignore the freezing sensation in my stomach. It is clear the sender of this message has discovered my relationship with Mark, but who – apart from Angus – would care enough about it to threaten me? And surely Angus wouldn’t react by writing like a backstreet gangster seconds after asking when I was coming home? Besides, all he knows about Daniel is the newspaper report of the cycling accident that I showed him ages ago. The only person I can think of who understands the past, and its dirty, sordid complexity, is Julia. Yet I am quite certain Julia is the last person who would want to rake all that up again and poison the air of whatever new little world she has managed to create for herself.
I make myself study the screen again. The phone number of the sender rings no bells whatsoever.
I wonder, suddenly, if Mark has a girlfriend. There is a child, I remember, from the first time I viewed the house, and – he said – an ex-wife. It is possible he is now with somebody else, a partner who has reason to mistrust him, who has studied his phone and has found his calls to me. She might have confronted Mark, she may have demanded my name. She would have had to dig very deep to unearth anything of interest, anything suspicious, about Daniel; she would need to have been extremely motivated indeed. However, it’s possible that a girlfriend who has been cheated on, who has been lied to, who can’t bear to lose, could fit that particular bill very well.
I run my tongue over my dry lips. The woman opposite has begun to snore, gentle little hiccups, her head resting against the glass. On the table in front of her is an open bottle of Evian. I contemplate reaching forward and taking a mouthful of water. Although I am sorely tempted, I know I won’t help myself to her drink because it seems way too forward, far too rude. Funny, how we baulk at taking little liberties, how much it is easier to take the bigger, more dramatic steps.
Who is this? I type. What do you want? I chuck the mobile into my bag, then I change my mind and slip it into my trouser pocket for quicker, easier access when the response arrives.
The train is slowing down, the journey time between Colchester and Ipswich is barely twenty minutes and already we are pulling into the station. Standing up, I catch a brief glimpse of my stepfather waiting patiently by a closed coffee kiosk before the carriage jerks forward another few metres and instead the window exposes a couple of lads larking around with cans of lager.
‘I’ve brought the Fiesta,’ my stepfather says when we embrace on the platform. ‘I didn’t know how much luggage you would have.’
I hold up my small bag. ‘I can only stay one night.’
‘Oh well.’ He shrugs, although I don’t expect my mother to take the disappointment of the curtailed visit quite as easily. ‘It would have been a cold night to walk.’
My parents live about a mile from the station – it probably takes as long to get out of the car park and battle the Friday night traffic as it would have done to cover the distance on foot. Still, the journey gives me an opportunity to check my phone, the light flaring briefly in the darkness of the car.
My stepfather half-turns from the steering wheel. ‘Angus missing you already?’
I smile and make a movement with my head that is neither a nod nor a shake.
The screen is blank.
* * *
My mother and Rob appear in the hallway as soon as we arrive, it’s entirely possible that they have been hovering in the vicinity of the front door since the moment my stepfather left to collect me. My mother hugs me, before holding me out at arm’s-length, like an item of clothing she has just taken off the rack in a shop. ‘You’re looking thinner, Claire, too thin. Don’t you think she looks thin, Andy?’
Before my stepfather can speak, my brother comes to the rescue by squeezing past my mother in the narrow hallway and wrapping his arms around me. He is wearing an old navy-blue T-shirt with a Star Wars motif. The cotton smells of homework on the kitchen table, of TV dinners on our laps, of walking to the newsagents every Saturday to spend our pocket money. My brother smells of memories I didn’t even know I had. He smells of my childhood.
‘Hey, sis, good to see you.’
I remember that my younger sibling is very soon going to be a father. ‘Congratulations,’ I say, and when he looks at me blankly – the pregnancy was announced some time ago, after all – I add, ‘about the baby.’
‘Right. Thanks.’
I examine his face, trying to detect any sign of reticence about the impending responsibility, but the only trace of anxiety I can see is a warm, outward kind of concern. Directed at me, I think.
‘I’ll just take my bag upstairs,’ I say, to extract myself from the excess of affection clogging up the hallway.
Upstairs my room is practically the same as when I left to go to university: a single bed by the window, a bookshelf with a complete set of A-level revision guides and a DIY Formica desk that bridges the small space between my wardrobe and the outside wall. The only concession to the passage of time is the duvet cover. I realise that my mother has finally switched a close-up photograph of the members of Take That – minus Robbie – for sprigs of blue flowers against a cream background.
I perch on the bed, compelled to consult my mobile again. There is no further communication from my mystery correspondent. I compose a text to Angus to say that I’ve arrived safely, more to test the water than because either of us regards the journey between Liverpool Street and my parents’ front door as particularly hazardous. A perfectly pleasant if short reply zips back immediately.
I pull up the message from the train. Reading it again provokes the same cloud of nauseous confusion, the same complex, unforgettable thoughts about Daniel.
‘Claire, whatever are you doing up there?’ There is a surprising edge to my mother’s voice.
‘I’m just coming down.’ As I switch off the light, our garden becomes visible in the window, tinted vaguely orange in the borrowed glow of the street lamps. Rob and I used to play there for hours when we were little. He was so young when my father left us he had no notion there might be anything bigger or better beyond the boundary of its wooden fence. I, on the other hand, had glimpsed the possibilities that were there for the taking. To my horror, staring at the defunct swing, the listing bird table, a lump the size of a tennis ball appears in my throat. If I had hoped that by coming home I might rediscover the person I used to be when I lived here, the person I was before I met Mark, before I met Daniel, it’s obvious I’ve been wasting my time. That person checked out and did a runner quite some time ago.
‘Andy says that you’re staying just the one night! We’re all supposed to be going out tomorrow to Pizza Express. For Rob’s birthday.’ My mother is standing at the bottom of the staircase and has started speaking before I am even halfway down the steps.
‘I’m sorry. I really need to get back to London. What with my government work at the department, and the wedding to organise…’ I play these two trump cards, dangle them like flags, while we walk to the kitchen where Elsa is sitting at our scrubbed pine table. I had forgotten she would be here or, to be more accurate, I had hoped I would have Rob to myself for the evening. When she gets up to greet m
e the bump under her dress makes her look like a snake that has swallowed a golf ball.
‘Claire is only here for tonight,’ my mother announces, although I’m pretty sure the others must be well aware of this already. ‘We’ll just have to make the most of her while we can.’ As we all shuffle into places around the table, she extracts an enormous shepherd’s pie from the oven and proceeds to dole out equally enormous portions.
I find I can barely eat, although the scrutiny of my mother’s gaze makes me shovel a few forkfuls down my throat. After about ten minutes, when I am fielding questions on the tribunal, on Angus, on our plans for the Big Day, I feel my mobile twang in my pocket. Something in my expression must change because the conversation suddenly dies.
‘Everything all right?’ my stepfather asks.
I nod, before realising that I can’t possibly sit through the meal without checking my inbox. ‘Actually, sorry, but I’d better…’ I am getting up, pulling out the phone and holding it aloft like a piece of vital evidence in a court trial while the others regard me with astonishment over the top of their knives and forks. ‘I won’t be a moment.’ I dive into the hallway and consult the screen. Nothing but an email from booking.com promising me a fifteen-percent discount on any reservation made before midnight on Sunday.
I creep back into the kitchen rather sheepishly. ‘There’s a bit of a crisis in the office at the moment,’ I proffer by way of explanation. ‘I just needed to check if that was a message from my boss.’
My stepfather raises his eyebrows. ‘On a Friday evening?’
My mother gives my stepfather her withering look, ‘Claire’s job isn’t like yours, Andy. The government doesn’t stop because of the weekend. It’s twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Isn’t that right, dear?’ Naturally, my mother has never witnessed the haemorrhaging of civil servants out of the door at 4.30 p.m. on a Friday.
I reward her with a smile and take the chance to start asking Elsa about the pregnancy – anything to change the subject. Elsa immediately launches into a willing account of ultrasounds and birthing plans and the benefits of breastfeeding a baby until it is practically a teenager. My parents and Rob all trade anxious glances, but when they see I am not going to start weeping or rush out of the room again everyone relaxes and for the next half an hour I forget about the sinister message and I forget about Mark. I probably even forget about Daniel.
The Couple: An unputdownable psychological thriller with a breathtaking twist Page 21