I curled my toes, shuffling my shoes against the chipped bark.
Had Ailsa been serious? Did my feet in fact smell?
The light on the lawn flickered, sent finger-shaped shadows. The music had got louder – a wailing blur. I didn’t want to go back now. I thought about trying to clamber over the fence, but it was too high to scale, even if, when I reached the other side, I could get through the brambles. No, I should go back, see Ailsa again. Her wing woman. Kent. What had happened there? I thought about how hard she always tried to pretend everything was fine, and how vulnerable she was beneath her façade. And poor Max, too. Tomorrow I should offer to help clear up, maybe in the different surroundings of her house we would properly talk, I could see if I could get through to her, help her navigate a way out.
I stood up, brushing the compost off my jeans. I looked down at my trainers – at the stringy particles of bark that clung to the soles. And then, I stood very still. Beneath the throb of the party, the pulsing rise and fall of it, I caught something else; movement perhaps, a different quality of sound. The iron arch sighed, swayed; there was a murmur, a rustle, a loud inhalation and then a giggle.
‘We’re safe,’ Tom said, his voice slow and suggestive. ‘The shrubs are protecting us.’
A few seconds in which no one spoke. More rustling and a click, the sound of deep breathing.
I kept my feet as still as I could. By moving my head, I could get Tom in my line of vision. His head was forwards, almost touching a woman’s, and his hands seemed to be cupped over hers.
He straightened up and she let out a sigh. ‘Delicious,’ she said. Delilah.
She had her back to me, but she held her cigarette out at shoulder height in the manner of a 1920s debutante.
‘Don’t tell Johnny,’ she said. ‘You promise? He’d kill me if he found out.’
‘Our little secret,’ Tom said.
Smoking. That’s all it was. All smokers seem guilty and skulking. It’s the nature of it.
‘Need to do some work out here,’ she said. ‘Ailsa’s wilderness is getting a bit overgrown.’
‘It’s all the bloody weeds creeping under the fence, self-seeding from next door. I’m sure I hear rats there too.’
For a few moments neither of them spoke, and then Delilah said: ‘How’s it going with Ricky Addison?’
He exhaled slowly, in stages; trying to blow rings. ‘I’m making such a dick of myself. He’s only here because Ailsa asked.’
‘He didn’t have to come.’
‘They’ve had a lot of international offers. It would be a lot of business – it’s worth the humiliation.’ He took another drag. ‘You’re cold.’ She told him she was fine, but he rubbed his palms quickly up and down her arms. ‘You need more flesh on you,’ he said.
She laughed, flicking her ash into the flower bed. ‘Eyes.’
‘If you must wear such a low-cut top.’
His hands still holding her arms, he shifted her into the side of the archway. She giggled. I held my breath. They were inches away from me. If either of them turned their heads, they would see me.
‘Kiss for old times’ sake?’ he said.
She slipped from under him then, started swaying back down the lawn.
‘Not fair,’ she said over her shoulder.
He pushed himself upright. The archway rocked, the shrubs next to it rustled, and he followed her back towards the light.
Chapter Fourteen
Pret Jambon-Beurre
Superior, adjective. In ironic use. Characteristic of
or designating someone who thinks he or she is
better than someone else; having or displaying a
high opinion of oneself; supercilious, condescending,
patronising.
She took over the cooking last night, something with broccoli and pasta from the Fat Flavours, Thin Thighs website: I’m amazed she can bear to look at it, after its connection to Tom’s last meal; I suppose it’s a sign she’s feeling more herself. No word yet from the children, but she is optimistic. She told me while we ate that she’d had a long conversation with Standling (when?) and that he told her he should have good news soon.
I went to bed straight after. It’s not like me. A dull persistent pain bloomed in my temples. My vision was odd. She helped me upstairs. She brought me a cup of herbal tea and sat at the side of the bed. I must have passed straight out. When I woke a few hours later, she had gone. Had the dog barked? No, I could hear noises in Mother’s room: the vibrations of Ailsa’s steps; the creak of the cupboard door, a muffled bang as an object dropped. She was looking for something. I don’t know what. I could ask, but I’m a bit scared of her when she’s in this mood. In the end, I put in earplugs, which I haven’t done since she arrived. The enforced deafness makes me feel vulnerable. Also, I prefer to be alert in case she needs me.
On the Monday after the party, I had lunch with Fred, my old friend from King’s, to distract me. We met once a month though since Ailsa had started taking up so much of my time, I had been harder to pin down.
That morning I set off with purpose. Fred would be a useful sounding board. He had no connection with the Tilsons, lived some distance away and had more experience and wisdom than I did in the relationship department. For the sake of full disclosure, I think I should admit I was looking forward to having something interesting to discuss with him. A small dishonourable part of me felt important; glad, for once, to have a drama of my own to share.
He had come to London, as he regularly did, to do some research at the British Library. Usually he treats me to what he calls ‘a slap-up’ at Côte in Covent Garden. But it was so warm that on Monday he suggested we meet outside Pret at King’s Cross station and buy a picnic.
It was a bit stressful choosing, with office workers and people rushing for trains, so we didn’t have a chance to talk properly until we were sitting on a bench in Granary Square, that bright new space they’ve created out of urban wasteland. It’s really quite the scene up there: fountains erupting out of pavements, steps fashioned from artificial grass, brickwork so scrubbed and clean the ancient warehouses look modern; even the stretch of canal, once grimy and syringe-scattered, runs sleek and shiny as if moulded out of metal.
It didn’t take long to eat our food. I am partial at Pret to the Jambon Beurre, not a big mouthful, and Fred, who is a fussy eater, made quick work of his simple cheese and butter sandwich which is, I think, intended for children. He rolled up our rubbish and placed it in a nearby bin, and sitting back down, mopped his brow with a large white cotton handkerchief he had taken out of his top pocket for the purpose. We were facing a row of orange deckchairs in which office workers were sunning themselves in various states of déshabillé. Next to their acres of exposed, reddening flesh, our sartorial decisions must have looked incongruous. Fred was wearing a lightweight checked suit, a floral shirt and his trademark cravat, while I was in a corduroy dress from Ailsa’s jumble, with the primrose jacket. Hot but smart.
Fred was in a cheerful mood. His book, on Renaissance swear words, was going well and he and his boyfriend Raoul, a classics don, were off to Italy that weekend to walk the Cinque Terre. He outlined in detail their decision to stay not in Levanto but Sestri Levante (more restaurants, bigger beach), and for a while I found it hard to get a word in edgeways.
‘So we’re both looking forward to it,’ he said. ‘Getting out the old walking boots. Working up an appetite. Liguria, you know it’s where pesto comes from.’
‘And I thought that was Marks & Spencer.’
‘Ah, very funny.’
Two small children ran giggling into the small fountain spumes. Their mother unhitched a younger sibling from a buggy and he toddled in after them, stomping his bare feet up and down, as if he were marching on the spot.
I noticed Fred frown with mild distaste. ‘So how’s Maudie?’ he said.
‘Bit of arthritis,’ I said. ‘But otherwise good.’
This, I realised, was the usual patte
rn of our meetings. He would arrive bursting with anecdotes and plans and prospective jaunts, and only when his stories ran out would there be a pause and he’d ask first after Maudie, and then my job.
Pause.
‘And what news from the OED?’
I told him about the latest notes from my editor – a close friend of his. I let him bitch for a bit, with equal quantities of rancour and fondness. ‘He’s always so pedantic,’ he said. ‘The tedium of that prissy attention to detail. I don’t know how he does it, day in, day out.’
I let that lie for a second.
Fred didn’t seem to notice he might have offended me too. ‘It’s about time you came down to the office for a visit, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘You must let me know when you next do and we can meet up in Oxford. Raoul would love to see you again. Or just come and see us, when we’re back from Italy. It’ll be August before we know it.’
‘Yes. I will. I’ve just been busy. Yes, quite busy, really.’
‘Oh, that’s good.’ He sounded pleased. ‘Anything in particular?’
‘I’ve been seeing a lot of Ailsa – you know, the woman who moved in next door. I told you about her.’
‘The people who made such a terrible racket and mess, whose son you were helping with his English?’
‘Yes.’ I felt the slight irritation of a story being anticipated, or of when a friend relates back something you have told them with none of the original nuance. ‘Them.’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘How did the boy’s A level go?’
I decided not to correct him. ‘Well. I think it went well.’
‘Oh, Verity. I do hope they’ve been paying you.’
I looked away, hot under the arms, flustered. ‘She pays me in kind. She’s always buying me lunch, coffee. We’re in and out of each other’s houses.’ I didn’t say anything about the clear-up. He had never visited me at home – the very idea was the definition of agony, like being peeled from the inside out. ‘It’s lovely, actually, to have a new friend.’
Over the years Fred has been a big campaigner on my behalf. When Mother died, he said he understood how hard it had been, as her main carer, to carve out a life of my own, and that now she was gone I shouldn’t – I think his phrase was ‘shrivel up’. He took it upon himself to research clubs and activities suitable for the single person in my area. The AquaFit class at the leisure centre was not a success, but the pub quiz was a lifeline.
He didn’t speak for a moment or two. Behind him a child clapped. A flock of pigeons, spooked, flapped into the air, and landed a few feet away. ‘That’s nice,’ he said eventually. But he didn’t sound as if he thought it was at all nice.
‘Yes. She’s really warm, full of life.’
‘That’s nice,’ he said again.
‘But also thoughtful and troubled. She has a few mental health issues and her marriage . . .’
‘Oh you’re no one without a few mental health issues these days.’
This wasn’t proving nearly as enjoyable as I’d anticipated. I ploughed on. ‘Something is horribly wrong in the house, in her marriage. The family. On the surface they seem normal, but . . .’
‘But what?’ He sounded irritated.
‘Well, to begin with, she told me the other day that she was already pregnant when she met her husband. Her eldest isn’t biologically his.’
Fred shrugged. ‘I don’t see that it makes much of a difference. It’s the case in lots of blended families. Life is complicated, Verity. It’s not all Janet and John.’
I felt immediately vexed, misunderstood. I knew that, and now I was the focus of his moral scrutiny, not the Tilsons. ‘But the father’s such a bully. They’re all terrified of him. Well, not the little girl, and actually maybe not Melissa. But the son – Max – he’s horrible to him.’
Fred swept some invisible crumbs off his trouser leg. ‘Families are tangled and intricate and contradictory. You know that as well as anyone. Remember how awful your mother was to your sister until you came back and then, as soon as she was gone, she became the favourite?’
He’d derailed me again. I closed my eyes for a few seconds to recover, hearing my mother in my head, her voice querulously asking after Faith, repeating examples of her beauty and charm, how good she was at cooking, how gentle she was with a Tubigrip elasticated bandage. But that was just the three of us. What did I know about family?
‘The thing is I’m not even sure he’s faithful,’ I said. ‘I saw him at their party in the garden with another woman.’
‘Ah. Doing the beast with two backs? He’s doing the dirty on her and you’re trying to decide whether to tell her? One word of advice: no. Keep out of it at all costs. It’s never a good idea to interfere in other people’s affairs. If I were you, I’d keep myself to myself.’
‘They weren’t actually . . . It was just the atmosphere, the sense that something was about to happen. I have that all the time, that they’re poised on the edge of disaster. I keep thinking I should be doing more to help her, to give her a way out.’ And then responding to a deep pang of longing that had for some reason risen inside me, I added, ‘In some ways, actually, she reminds me of Faith.’
He winced. ‘And that’s a good thing?’
Fred had never liked Faith. When she used to visit me at King’s, she’d take over, within minutes making her presence felt, not just as the prettiest but the loudest and the drunkest in the common room. The college parties weren’t good enough; we’d be off up to Camden on the bus to some club she had heard about, and Fred and I would sit in the corner talking about semantics while she and the others drank and gyrated and disappeared to the toilets to get up to goodness knows what.
Behind his head, the sun glinted on the warehouse windows. He put his hand on the sleeve of my jacket, his fingers long and white, the cuticles neatly pared around the moons. ‘I’m sorry to say it, but maybe the last thing you need in your life is another Faith.’
Over the years, it had suited me to let him turn Faith into a cliché, to extrapolate an airhead from the airy eighteen-year-old (and even then she hadn’t really been airy; she’d been troubled and fierce and undisciplined, but also funny and honest and sweet). I had been selective in what I’d chosen to tell him. It’s too easy to give incomplete version of ourselves, and others. It had given me a small vicious pleasure to laugh at her silly, frivolous, boring job as a hairdresser; I hadn’t told him about her growing roster of private clients, that she had done magazine work and cut hair on stage in front of hundreds of people at conventions, that she had travelled widely for work and for pleasure, that when I had last seen her, she had had a lover and friends and a rich, full life. It came to me, sitting on that bench surrounded by office workers, that actually Fred wasn’t always right, that sometimes my desire to please him had held me back, that all those years ago, I wouldn’t have minded doing the gyrating and the goodness knows what myself.
I tried to smile. ‘I’ve become very fond of her, and her children – the boy Max particularly. I want to help her.’
‘I just think you’ve got enough on your plate.’
‘Like what?’ I noticed the thinness, then, of his upper lip. ‘What have I got on my plate?’
He didn’t answer, just churned his mouth in circles, his eyes pained and kind. ‘People take advantage of you,’ he said.
‘No one is taking advantage of me,’ I said.
He was jealous, I told myself, as I strap-hung on a sweltering Tube home. Our relationship was based on convenient lies. He said he didn’t want me to be lonely, but it suited him to think of me as dependent, and sad and small. Well, things changed. People moved on. Maybe I’d had enough of Fred. Maybe it would be a good idea if we didn’t see each other for a while.
Chapter Fifteen
Swallows and Amazons series: incomplete set (Pigeon Post missing). Jonathan Cape. In publisher’s green cloth bindings, some with illustrated dust wrappers.
Suspended Animation, noun. The temporary cessation of most v
ital functions without death, as in a dormant seed or a hibernating animal.
Ailsa says it’s because of me that her work on my house stopped. It’s not true. The only time I barred her path was when she tried to take away the box of Arthur Ransomes. No, she may not like to admit it, but she got bored.
It was gradual, now I look back on it. Her visits had already tailed off, though it was that week when I realised it was over.
It’s awful how the walls compress when you’re waiting. She sent me a text on Tuesday asking if I would be in. I’d replied, ‘Yes, all day!’, which was too vague. Her response, ‘Good. Will pop in’, equally so. I didn’t think it mattered at first. I was working on ‘clever’ – a juicy little word – a surprising late arrival in our vocabulary, cited in 1682 by Thomas Browne as peculiar to East Anglia; probably related to the Middle English ‘clivers’, meaning claws, talons, clutches (which casts the phrase ‘clever devil’ in an altogether different light). Normally, it would have absorbed me but as often happens when Ailsa is concerned, concentration evaded me.
Finders, Keepers: The mesmerising new thriller from the author of LIE WITH ME Page 16