‘Guilty as charged,’ Tom said as he handed me my glass – a large tumbler, with a diamond pattern pressed into it. ‘My misspent youth.’
‘I’m sure the statute of limitations on that is up,’ I said.
Pulling out a chair for me to sit at the table, he made a comic rolling of his eyes. ‘I hope so.’
Ailsa came back into the room and joined us. I nursed my gin. Neither of them, I realised, had poured a drink for themselves.
I began over the next few minutes to wonder if I had misjudged Tom. I rather liked the way he treated me – a mild sort of semi-detached wryness. I even rather enjoyed the questions he began to levelled in my direction. I didn’t often get to talk about myself. How long had I lived here? All my life? No! What extraordinary perseverance. I’d looked after my mother? I was a veritable saint. No siblings? A sister – ‘Oh, the one that got away?’ I smiled in agreement. ‘You could say that, yes.’ I became numbed to more dangerous enquiries. Had I noticed that a window at the back of my house – on the second floor, to the right – was badly cracked? We shared a drain: any problems in the past? Would I mind if they sent a man to have a little prod? I did rear back a few inches then, concealing my alarm in a joke – ‘A little prod?’ I said. ‘It’s a long time since a man’s given me a little prod.’ Ailsa deftly swooped in. ‘I just love Trinity Fields,’ she said. ‘Nicer than Balham where we’ve been renting. I can understand why you live here. I can’t imagine myself ever moving away.’
Why, I asked, had they left Kent?
Ailsa looked down. She started fiddling with the pepper pot on the table in front of her, grinding a tiny bit into her hand and then dipping her finger into it and dabbing it on her tongue.
‘Don’t mention Kent,’ Tom said.
‘OK.’
‘We needed a fresh start,’ Tom added. ‘Kent’s not everybody’s cup of tea. To be honest, I hate the place.’
A silence bloomed.
Ailsa looked deeply uncomfortable. She was fiddling with her scalp, fiddling with her hair at the roots, with tense, almost aggressive stabs.
‘Ailsa, you’re in HR?’ I said, to change the subject.
She looked up then. ‘I’m not working at the moment,’ she said. ‘Finding it hard to get back into it after the kids.’
I turned back to Tom. ‘And you’re in the record business?’
‘No. No. Not really. I’m a lawyer. I specialise in entertainment law. I’ve started my own boutique firm. The music biz is certainly part of it. Musicians. Tech companies.’ He nodded his chin at a bouquet of flowers on the counter, still in their cellophane. ‘The occasional movie star.’
I was about to ask which florally grateful occasional movie star – anyone I’d heard of? – when the front door slammed and two children burst into the doorway.
They were ten, I knew. Max and Bea. They had that almost-but-not-quite symmetry of some twins, the sense that one – in this case the girl – was slightly more finished than the other. The boy was paler, and smaller. He had a bruise on his forehead, and one of his eyes turned down very slightly. The girl, freckly and robust, bounced in, ignoring me, a stranger at the table, and started opening cupboards. ‘What is there to eat?’ she said. ‘I’m starving.’ The boy stood shyly in the doorway, a pair of football boots in his hands dropping flecks of mud onto the floor.
Ailsa got up and took the boots off the boy, quickly sweeping the bits of mud into one corner with her foot. She cupped the back of his head with her hand, smoothing his hair while drawing him into the room. She introduced me, made him and his sister say hello and then busied herself, pouring juice and reaching up to a top cupboard for a tin of cake. ‘Lemon drizzle,’ she said, handing them a slice each. ‘That’ll keep you going.’
‘I love a lemon drizzle,’ I said. I was still watching the boy. ‘As long as it’s moist.’
‘Moist!’ Ailsa said, bringing it over to the table. ‘How funny. Do you just hate that word too? It’s the worst, isn’t it? Moist.’
It is very her, now I think of it, that tendency to kill a joke by spelling it out.
‘How can you hate a word?’ Bea said. ‘That’s so random.’
‘I don’t like words,’ her brother said. ‘Most of them anyway.’
‘That’s an odd thing to say.’ Tom furrowed his brow. ‘What will our new neighbour think of us?’
‘Max’s an idiot,’ the girl said, springing across to sit on her father’s knee.
The room appeared to regroup around me, the girl’s arms snaked around her father’s neck; the boy standing quietly behind his mother’s chair. His eyes seemed to sink, the skin beneath them to darken. Family dynamics are always of interest to me. I know only too well how alliances build, how parents, despite their avowals to the contrary, have favourites. I could do anything for my mother: wash her, read to her, bring morsels of her chosen meals, and it was always Faith she talked about. ‘Oh, but of course Faith,’ she’d say to visitors, ‘has done so well for herself.’ I know, too, how it isn’t always comfortable being the favourite, how it creates its own pressures and resentments. ‘She never sees me,’ Faith used to say. ‘It all has to be wonderful. There’s never any room for darkness.’ But then that was Mother all over.
I opened my mouth to speak, to say anything, really, to rearrange the atoms. I began explaining how, in fact, it was actually quite a coincidence because words were my metier.
‘Your metier?’ Tom said, in that same arch tone. I suspect he hadn’t associated me with employment. He probably thought I spent my time making jam, doing crafts.
‘Indeed.’
And I told them about my work as a lexicographer for the OED, that I was involved with the history of language, how words and meanings have changed over time, and that my job was to help record that.
I could see, like many people, they didn’t really grasp it. They seemed to decide that I worked for the Concise English Dictionary, that my role was not to document the changing meaning of words but simply to spell them.
‘We could do with some help with spelling around here,’ Ailsa said, reaching one arm back to touch Max’s leg.
‘Max has a learning difficulty. Or a learning difference as I think we’re now supposed to call it.’ Tom laughed, not exactly unkindly.
Ailsa sighed. ‘It means homework is torture. It’s all spellings.’
‘This week they’re impossible,’ Max said. ‘I mean how am I supposed to learn, like, “accommodation”.’
‘Two cots, two mattresses,’ I said.
He swung his head to eye me with suspicion. ‘ “Necessary”.’
‘One cap, two socks.’
‘Or what about, like . . .’ He wracked his brain. ‘ “Rhythm”?’
‘If you could say a sentence without saying “like”, it would be a start,’ Tom said.
I thought for a moment. ‘Rhythm helps your two hips move.’
Bea slipped off her father’s lap and grabbed a rucksack off the floor. She pulled a piece of loose paper out and started reading out the list: ‘ “Harass”. “Embarrass”. “Forty”. “Excellent”. How can Max not know “excellent”? Maybe because he never sees it written at the end of his work.’
‘Bea,’ Ailsa said warningly. ‘Don’t be mean.’
I started improvising, coming up with mnemonics for each of the words listed, sprinkling in as many swear words as I could manage. Ailsa was looking doubtful but when Max started to repeat the spellings back to me, she laughed and said: ‘Move in, please, and do his homework with him every day? I’ll pay you! Don’t you think, Tom?’
He smiled thinly. ‘If I couldn’t spell a word when I was his age, my father used to tan me until I got it right. That’s one method.’
‘I think Verity’s is rather better, don’t you? Well I do anyway.’ She reached out and squeezed my hand. ‘Thank you.’
I took another sip of my gin and tonic. It really was quite stonkingly strong. I sat back in my chair, crossing my legs at the ankle. I
began to feel strangely comfortable, to imagine myself sorting out this little family.
‘So, Verity,’ Tom said. He’d been looking at me. ‘You have a dog.’
‘Yes I do,’ I said. ‘She’s a terrier-cross, a rescue – wire-haired – big squirreler.’
‘Is it squirrels then that he’s barking at in the garden?’ Tom said.
Ailsa was watching him, with a placid smile. Her fingers had begun again to fiddle with her hair, isolating a strand; she gave it a little tug. It was something I would later see her do often.
I put my glass down on the table. I’d left a ludicrous pink lipstick mark on the rim; I wiped at it with my thumb. ‘Yes. Or foxes. She—’ I paused for emphasis. ‘Also likes a fox.’
Smoothing my skirt, I noticed a stain just above the knee where I had spilt some tomato sauce opening a tin of baked beans.
‘One suggestion,’ Tom said reasonably. ‘One way in which the foxes might bugger off and the dog shut up is if you cut your garden back a bit. As I said the other day, it’s only neighbourly of you to clear some of that undergrowth; all those weeds, goodness knows what’s in there. We’re trying to make a nice garden here and we don’t want all that unknown stuff propagating in ours. The ivy’s creeping everywhere. And those trees of yours – the holly, the apple, etc – they’re blocking out a lot of our light.’
I rubbed my wrists where the elastic in the gathered sleeves on my new top had left a crinkled line of indentations. As the silence tightened, I was aware of something growing taut inside me too. How foolish I’d been to think they might be interested in my company.
I sat up straighter. I tried to think about the mnenomics and to be grateful for the gin. I smiled into their expectant faces and said, ‘I’ll have a little prune, then.’
Tom’s jaw relaxed. ‘That’s great news.’ He clapped his hands together. ‘Super.’ He nodded at Ailsa and, pushing his chair back, walked over to his phone which he had left charging on the side. ‘If you’ll excuse me a second,’ he said. He began scrolling through his messages, then tapped out one of his own, his brow furrowed. ‘What time’s supper?’ he said to Ailsa without looking up.
She sighed deeply. It sounded like a release of tension. She started sweeping crumbs into a little pile. ‘When would you like it?’
He didn’t answer.
When I got to my feet and said I ought to be going no one suggested that I didn’t.
They both accompanied me to the front door – grateful, perhaps, to see me go, grateful certainly for the major garden decimation upon which I was shortly to embark (NOT!). On the table in the hall was a bag of old clothes – ‘Heart Foundation’ the bag said on the front. My eye must have rested on this a fraction too long, because Ailsa looked at me and her lips parted, as if she had thought of saying something, but hadn’t quite found the right words.
I couldn’t bear it, so I leapt in and told her the church was having a jumble and I could take it for her if that was easier, and she nodded, relieved even, and handed it over.
There is a lot to say about this first meeting. Certainly at the time I registered a sense of unease, of something being not quite right; definitely in Ailsa’s behaviour, an impression she was subdued. But when I reached the gate, they were framed in the doorway; his arm was around her shoulder and she was leaning into him. What was it he said? ‘A fresh start’. They looked like the perfect couple, on the threshold of their new home.
At the time it wasn’t the dynamic between them, but my relationship with them on which I fixated.
They had already, you see, begun to draw me in.
Chapter Five
1 bicycle pump valve adapter connector, red
Petrichor, noun. A pleasant, distinctive smell frequently accompanying the first rain after a long period of warm dry weather in certain regions.
I saw Rose this morning at the post office; she was in the queue ahead of me, arms full of ASOS packages to return. Just another mother doing their teenager’s dirty work. I thought of hiding, but in the end I butched it out. Of all the people who’ve betrayed Ailsa, she’s the worst. I’ll never forgive her for driving the children down to Tom’s parents – who knows what poison they’re dripping into the children’s ears? What happened to them all? Where did they go? The women at her book club. The gang from Pilates. Delilah? Death is of course its own form of embarrassment. I think of all those neighbours who crossed the road to avoid me when Mother died. How much worse when the chief mourner is said to have hastened the death. What is due then? Commiserations or big congrats? I’m being facetious. But the instinct of Ailsa’s friends to turn their backs, to say ‘She wasn’t who I thought she was’ unsettles me. It’s too tidy. No one seems to appreciate that maybe it’s greyer and murkier; that she is still the same person, that maybe she’s deserving of their sympathy, or empathy. I suspect none of them were ever proper friends; these relationships, like so much with Ailsa, were a chimera.
It was on the top of my tongue when I saw Rose to say something. Instead, I just walked past her, my face rigid.
Ten days or so after the gin and tonic, I was walking across the small triangle of common between the train station and the road. I’d had lunch with Fred Pullen, my old university friend, and I was in a frisky mood. We had met at Côte in Covent Garden. His treat. Wine had been drunk.
The boy was walking along the path in front of me, in a school sweatshirt, carrying a backpack. He had a stick in his left hand and he was swiping at everything he passed: trees, a bin, a bench, a lamp-post. Clack, swish, clack. The backpack was only half zipped, and on each second or third swipe, a small item fell out: a pencil, a screwed-up piece of paper, a satsuma.
I picked the objects up, one after another, and then quickened my pace, to draw alongside him. ‘Hail fellow, well met,’ I said.
Max reared away from my outstretched hand, dropping the stick in his alarm. He spun his head wildly as if in search of rescue.
‘Verity Baxter from next door,’ I said. ‘She of the big elephants?’
He didn’t seem to recall with quite the fervour I’d expected, but he did scoop up his lost property and then made rather heavy weather of unshouldering his bag and stuffing them back in. I suggested he zip it fully this time, which he did.
We continued walking. I asked him how he’d done in his spelling test and he told me he’d got 7/10 and Bea had got 10, but she always did better than him. I asked where she was, and he told me drama club and that he hated drama club because of the teacher – ‘You think she’s nice and then she suddenly shouts at you for no reason.’ He let out a heavy sigh. Sometimes he cycled to school, he said, but his bike had a puncture and he’d lost the bit from the pump you slot into the tyre. ‘I always lose things, my dad says. He says when he was growing up he had to do chores to earn nice things, that I wouldn’t lose them if I understood their value.’ I listened, solicited a few more details and when we reached my house, told him to wait on my front path. He seemed nervous, insisting on hovering beyond the gate. A minute or two later – really quite a stroke of luck that I laid my hands on it so quickly – I emerged with what I could tell from his gleeful expression was the required value.
He said thank you several times and promised to bring it back. ‘Now I’ve just got my homework to get through,’ he added, in a weary sing-song.
‘Story writing’, it turned out. He’d been told to finish his ‘weather bank’. He’d started it in class and lots had already handed theirs in but – another heavy sigh, at the end of which he met my eyes for the first time: ‘What exactly is a weather bank?’
I don’t know what came over me, really. Partly it was the way his hair rose unbidden at the back: caused, I now know, by a double crown. Partly it was the reference to his father. I’m no expert but it doesn’t seem ideal parenting to accuse one’s child of ‘always’ doing anything. Mainly, though, it was the hopefulness of his expression – as if, after my success with the pump, this was another problem I could solve. I succumb
ed; to charm, or flattery, or out of sympathy or maybe it was the lunchtime glass of wine and, before I knew it, I’d volunteered my services.
Max had a key but he couldn’t make it work, and eventually a girl came to the door, wearing school games kit and fluffy bedroom socks, eating a piece of toast. I knew this was Melissa: I’d seen her around even if she hadn’t seen me. Her long dark hair was pulled back across a pimply forehead, her bulbous, snub nose appeared too large for her face. Her features always have a naturally sullen cast in repose, and she has braces. But she smiled widely when she saw me, practised politeness to a stranger on the doorstep, and when she did so the young Brigitte Bardot came to mind – making sense of the seagull row of boys who’d sat on my front wall the weekend her parents were away.
Ailsa was out, she told me – Wednesday was her ‘food bank day’ – and I wasn’t sure whether to feel relieved or disappointed.
Max and I sat at the kitchen table and he got out a crumpled exercise book. He’d written a few words about a summer’s day – ‘The sun was like a yellow ball. The clouds were like cotton wool.’ (I’ve corrected his spelling.) I suggested we start again, opting for bad weather and, with my guidance, he cobbled together a paragraph about a storm: rain ‘like needles’, ‘scudding’ clouds’, ‘furious thunder’, wind ‘pushing and shoving me like a bully’, and afterwards the ‘fresh grassy’ smell of the earth. He had a list of ‘language features’ he had to include – similes, metaphors, personification and something alarming called ‘wow words’, all of which I found a little reductive.
I began to really rather throw myself into it. ‘We’ll give them wow words!’ I said.
I didn’t hear anything from next door for a few days after this. It was just one of many good deeds, I told myself, flung into the abyss. But on the Friday of that week, Ailsa popped a card through my door, thanking me sooo much for mending Max’s bike and also for sorting his weather bank. ‘His teacher thought his writing was brilliant!!!’ She included her mobile phone number and asked if I would get in touch if I were at all interested in tutoring him on a more formal footing. Just for a few weeks or so until SATs. They could offer £15 an hour. He so rarely agrees to any help. If I had time, etc, etc. ‘And I am hopelessly impatient’ (‘hopelessly’ underlined three times).
Finders, Keepers: The mesmerising new thriller from the author of LIE WITH ME Page 4