Under My Skin

by Sarah Dunant

  “I … er … it was nothing,” I said.

  “I really thought it was all broken up. I kept wondering how I would cope, bringing them up on my own. What I’d do for money, how they’d be without a father. So many people do it, don’t they? It must be possible.”

  “Yes,” I said. “But you’re lucky. You don’t have to do it after all.”

  “No. No, I don’t.” She fell silent. I didn’t push it. That’s the thing about dope. Even the silences are OK. Although long.

  “We’re all right, Hannah,” she said after what seemed like an hour and a half. “Colin and me. We’ve talked about it. I wasn’t imagining it. There was something really wrong. A reason why we’ve grown apart, why he’d become so distant. The business has been in trouble. Serious trouble, much worse than he’d ever admitted to me. Eight months ago the bank threatened to foreclose on the loan because they’d fallen behind on payments. He even thought about selling the company, but he was advised that he wouldn’t get enough to cover the outstanding debts. He’s been worried sick for the best part of a year, but didn’t tell me because he didn’t want to burden me with it. He’s always felt that work was his responsibility, his half of the relationship, and he couldn’t bear for me to know he’d failed. Isn’t it crazy? That in the 1990s a man like him should still feel so ashamed of something like that?”

  I grunted. “Well, he’s always been a traditional kind of chap,” I said. Nice one, Colin. Make her feel sorry for you and then anything that comes after is forgiven in advance. I wondered who would mention the skirt first, her or me.

  “I was so angry with him. But then I kept thinking about his father and how nobody had ever said anything to anybody in that family. It was a big step for him. Telling me. You should have seen him,” she said quietly. “He cried. He said he felt that somehow he was betraying himself as a man, not being able to support the family. That if he’d told me he knew I would have helped, agreed to sell the house or go back to work to bring in extra money. But that would have broken his side of the bargain.”

  I thought of Kate sitting in her nice Islington kitchen awash with children and toys and chaos, against the odds so enjoying it all, happy to have a career behind her. Colin was right. Of course she would have coped, but it would also have been the death of a kind of innocence between them, a breaking of a promise. Not the only one, though.

  “And what about the other money?” I said at last. “The two or three hundred pounds he was taking out of the joint account every month. Did he tell you about that?” What had he said? That he was siphoning off private funds to pay the public debt. Very clever, Colin. Who says you’re not fit to run a business?

  “Oh, that …” She hesitated. “Hannah, I’m sorry, but I mean … if I tell you, will you promise me not to tell anyone else. I mean I know how you feel about Colin, but if Mum or anyone—it’s not for my sake, but Colin—”

  “Kate, it’s me, Hannah, remember. I’m the one who stopped talking about my life to Mum twenty years ago. You really think I’m going to tell tales on yours? I wouldn’t say a word to a living soul. Was it a woman?”

  She nodded and her face broke out into a sudden grin. “Yes. It was.”

  “Who was she?” I said, the dope pushing me into an amazed smile in reply to her laughter.

  “She was a therapist.”

  “What?”

  “A therapist.”

  I would have laughed, too, had my bottom jaw not fallen so far away from my top one. Colin and a therapist?

  “Isn’t it incredible? When things started to go so wrong and he couldn’t tell me because he was so scared it would break up the marriage, he began to feel ill. He couldn’t sleep, then he started having panic attacks. So he went to his doctor and she suggested he should see someone and referred him to this woman in Kentish Town who deals with short-term crisis patients. She was wonderful apparently. Really helped him to think it through. When she heard that I had taken the kids to Mum, she told him that he had to tell me the truth. He came the very next day. He just walked into the room and burst into tears. Luckily Mum had the kids in the garden. Oh, Hannah. I felt so awful. That I hadn’t known, or hadn’t even tried to understand. He’s been through such pain, stupid bloody man.”

  I was grateful that she kept on talking. That way I didn’t have to say anything. My mind was spinning like some astronaut who’d snapped free from the space cable. A therapist. Jesus Christ. I ran it all back again: the monthly bills, the early mornings, the nice residential street, the basement flat, the fifty minutes on the clock, the next client in a suit and the unexpected ordinariness of the woman who had opened the door to me. And finally, the sight of Colin sobbing into his steering wheel. Look at it one way and you had infidelity, look at it another and it was crisis management.

  Much though I would have liked to disbelieve it, I knew immediately it was true. God, no wonder he’d been so freaked when he saw me. And so beside himself with worry and with rage. Poor old Colin. A man weighed down under the burdens of masculinity. It might have been better if she had been a hooker. Well, I know what to buy him for Christmas. The latest Pete Pantin album.

  I was lucky I was stoned, really. That way I could just roll with one thought into another, enjoy the journey, not have to take responsibility for the meaning, or my part in it. But dope can be a dangerous ally in such circumstances. Pleasure to paranoia is an easy step. When I got there, it hurt more than I care to admit. My God, among the many ways in which I have fucked up in my life this was a real beauty.

  Except for one thing. When she’d sat here a week ago weeping into her coffee cup, he hadn’t been the only problem in the marriage. She had been doing a little retreating herself, sexually as well as emotionally. Not anymore, it seemed.

  “And what about you, Kate? What about your doubts? Or are you ready to patch it all up?”

  She gave a little frown as if the reference embarrassed her. As well it might. Maybe they’d already sorted out that bit, making the bedsprings sing in Mother’s spare room. In which case they’d got more nerve than I ever had.

  “We’ll work it out,” she said quietly. And then, as if she knew it wasn’t enough: “It’s who I am now, Hannah. I don’t know how to be anybody else. Even if I wanted to.”

  And I knew that was all I was going to get. I looked at her, this sister of mine who had occupied such a powerful place in my childhood and my life. And I realized again the one single fact that always caused me trouble: that she actually loved this man, that against all the odds of his pomposity and conservatism, there was something in him that had touched her. Something in his steadiness and reserve and his old-fashioned notions of life and marriage that made her feel safe and free. And although what had happened would no doubt shake those easy choices, make them have to redefine each other anew, it wouldn’t entirely obliterate their relationship. Kate needed Colin. She might be lovely and bright and sassy enough to have a hundred others, but Colin and Ben and Amy were what she wanted. And I couldn’t keep pretending that she didn’t—like some women want bigger breasts and younger faces because they think it will make them feel good, because they want to fight the world in their way, not mine. And just because it wasn’t my choice, it didn’t give me any right to refuse them theirs, to assume that it automatically made them stupid or damaged. Face it, Hannah, you can’t make the world in the way you think it should be. You just have to accept it for what it is.

  Dope. Don’t you just love the philosophical depths into which it plunges you? I took a slug of champagne and climbed back into the ring. After all there was still a conversation going on.

  “… if you feel you can handle that?”

  “What? Sorry. I was still thinking about Colin.”

  “Hannah!” She laughed. “You don’t think they’re right, do you?”

  “Who?”

  “The people who say marijuana rots your brain?”

  “Nah,” I said. “They’re just jealous. What were you saying?”

/>   She poured the rest of the champagne into her own glass and took a gulp. “That we want you to come to supper next Saturday.”

  “We?”

  “Yes. Colin, too. He says if we’re going to turn over a new leaf, then you might as well be included. That it’s time you and he stopped behaving like a couple of school kids.”

  “Well, he can—”

  But she got in before me. “He knows that I talked to you. He knows that you know. I really think this is his way of trying to make peace.”

  Either that or I’m going to be the dinner; chopped and fricasseed in that big shiny Habitat wok of his and served with a cheeky little red from Oddbins. Except, with Colin’s financial problems, it would probably have to be Safeway from now on.

  But the joke was on me, really. He held all the trump cards. And given the depth of my guilt, it would be altogether easier to believe in his charity. Or his therapist. Maybe I should get her name. Maybe she could turn me around, too. After all, he wouldn’t be needing his 7:30 appointment any longer.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’d love to come, but maybe I could take a rain check? This last job finished in blood and tears and I need to get away for a bit. Maybe in a couple of weeks, when I get back—” I paused. “I promise.”

  She nodded and didn’t push it. She left quite soon afterward. Well, even the new Colin needed some help to put the kids to bed. But she had one more gift for the giving. As she dug around for her car keys, she came across it.

  “Oh, look, I almost forgot. This is for you. It was in one of the drawers at home. I thought you could put it on your notice board. For dart practice.”

  She handed me a photograph, worn and yellowing, with little whitish triangle marks at each corner showing that it had once been in an album. It was taken in the garden on that hideous swing settee that my mother had got with a trillion Green Shield stamp books about a hundred years ago. She and my father were sitting in it together, with Kate and I cross-legged in front of them, desperately trying to look older than our eight and nine years.

  They were holding hands. My mother’s hair was permed in that Hedy Lamarr way that forever divides fifties parents from the following decades. Her face seemed firmer and plumper than I ever remembered it. Olivia Marchant was right. My mother had once been much younger. I thought of her now—wrinkles like dried-up little tributaries feeding into the thin line of her lips, and the more generous spread of her stomach and thighs. Maybe that was the real reason Olivia had never had children. Whatever pleasure they might bring to the soul, their growing up would have been too savage a reminder of her own aging. Or perhaps, even worse, she feared they would have become competition. I was suddenly glad that my mother wasn’t part of the generation that longed for eternal youth, that she at least had the maternal courage to show me how to grow old. Mind you, the way I’d treated her over the years had probably hastened the process. Even in the photo I was snarling.

  “Don’t you love it?” Kate said. “Look, you’re the only one not smiling. Mum told me she remembers it being taken. You wanted to wear a miniskirt and she made you put on a proper dress, and you had a huge row about it and didn’t speak to anyone for the rest of the day.”

  We both laughed, and then she grabbed hold of me tight and hugged me to her. I hugged her back. Sisters. Could be they’re the only good thing to come out of families.

  After she left, I wrote a letter to Colin. Well, it was better than doing it face-to-face. It came out a little rambling, but was truthful and had a good deal more humility than I realized I had in me. I was pretty sure he would accept it. And then maybe I’d feel OK about going to supper.

  I was on my way to bed when the phone rang. There was a policeman on the other end of the line. Maybe he could smell the dope. I blew some smoke down the receiver just to make sure. But he didn’t arrest me.

  “I thought you’d like to know that the inquest is provisionally set for the thirteenth. You’ll need to be there, of course. Can you make it?”

  “Probably,” I said. “I’m thinking of going away for a while, but I should be back by then.”

  “Yeah, takes it out of you, doesn’t it?” Pause. “How you doing?”

  “Great,” I lied.

  “How’s the arm?”

  “Fine,” I lied again. The bruise from his fingers was already a study in purple. “How about your knee?”

  “Bloody painful. As is my chest. I’ve sustained less damage on a GBH charge.”

  There was a little silence during which no doubt we both thought about our time on the floor together. Do I fancy you? I thought. Will I ever fancy anyone again? You don’t know till you try, Hannah. How bad can it be, fucking a policeman?

  “I wondered if you wanted a drink sometime?” he said casually.

  “Is this official?”

  “Yeah, a double date with Meredith Rawlings. Does it sound official?”

  “Er—I don’t know,” I said. “I’m a little off beam still.”

  “OK. Well, I just rang to check. Look after yourself, Hannah.”

  “Michael—”

  “Yes?”

  “Maybe when I get back—” I paused. Oh well—I could always blame it on the dope later. “How about the day after tomorrow?”

  And he laughed. “Should I wear a uniform?”

  Now that’s what you might call an ending. Except, of course, it still isn’t one.

  The next day the weather broke with the morning and I looked out on a leaden sky, the wind whipping up the crisp packets, and children in duffel coats on their way to school. Another English summer reasserting its right to perversity. Maybe going away hadn’t been such a dumb idea after all. A way out of a bad date and a break before an even worse inquest. Could be just what I needed, as well as could afford, for once in my life. I did a quick piece of addition. Olivia’s varying moments of generosity came to just under two thousand quid, even after I had paid the windscreen man and the car pound. Well, I had earned it.

  Belinda Balliol’s Time Out was still sitting where I had left it on the table five days before. Nothing so out of date as an old listings magazine, except for the travel ads. Because it was still technically evidence, I had found myself unable to throw it away. Remind me to stick it in a cupboard if Grant ever ends up in my sitting room.

  I made myself a cup of coffee and flicked through to the back of the mag. In my imagination I was already halfway to Tuscany and that heartaching early evening light that makes everything rosy, both in landscape and in life, when my eye was caught by something else on the page. A box ad that had been ringed in careless blue pen. Zenith Travel: the best prices to North America. And by the side of it a name scribbled in that loopy little hand I had grown to know so well. “Richard.” Richard?

  So I rang the number. Well, it was just a phone call. No time, no trouble. Just a way of closing the book. Richard had just walked into the office. I could hear him drinking his cappuccino as he said good morning, slurping his way through the froth. I told him I was a friend of Belinda Balliol’s and that she’d recommended him to me.

  “Balliol?”

  “Tall girl, blond, good-looking?”

  “Oh yeah. Booked about six weeks ago. Picked up the ticket two weeks ago. How’s she enjoying Chicago?”

  “Chicago?” I said, quietly putting my own coffee cup down on the table.

  “Yeah,” he said. Then it unfolded like a flower before me. “Let me see. I can usually get this in one. Wednesday the twenty-eighth, afternoon British Midland flight to Amsterdam, then catching a KLM connection to Chicago that evening. I could have got the same price for her flying straight out of Heathrow, but that was the route she wanted. How’s that for memory, eh? So. Where can I do you for?”

  Chapter 22

  I said I’d get back to him. I don’t know whether he heard me or not. I was having some trouble with my ears, the sound of my own blood pumping too hard through the inside of my head. Chicago via Amsterdam. A long way from Mexico and exactly th
e same travel itinerary as someone else in this story. Although neither of them made their planes. What was it his secretary had said when I tried to book in for an appointment? “I’m sorry. He’s not available from Wednesday. He’ll be in Amsterdam and Chicago.”

  So Belinda was going to the same places as Maurice? Although not scheduled to reach Amsterdam at the same time. Of course, I knew that already. Grant had checked the passenger list. But then people would, wouldn’t they, I mean if they were suspicious? At least some people. Probably better to be safe than sorry. But Amsterdam to Chicago? Could be people hadn’t thought of checking that one.

  KLM had, though. They gave me a list of their noshows for the 773 morning flight out of Schiphol last Thursday. And guess what? Both of them were on it. And not only on it, but prebooked into adjoining club-class seats. I suppose, of course, it could just possibly have been a further planned persecution. Possible, but not, when you think about it, probable. Because if that was so, how come we didn’t find her ticket? Tickets aren’t like love letters. There is nothing painful or emotionally humiliating to hide there. No point in destroying them. On the contrary. Might even be there was something to celebrate in keeping them. They would certainly have packed an emotional punch even after death.

  I sat for a moment trying to take it all in. I tried to see her flat again, to call to mind all the places I might have missed in it, but the picture kept fading. Instead, I was sitting in my car in a Kentish Town street, watching a man going into a basement, seeing another following him. Then meeting a rather cautious woman in an ordinary skirt and top with some hastily applied mascara. Finding infidelity where there was none. Putting one and one together and making eleven. Easy mistake when you know. It’s not what you see, it’s the way you see it. Or the way you want to see it. What had Colin said? “You’re a stupid prejudiced woman—and you don’t have the first clue about what is happening here.”

  On the desk I saw my own scribbled sums, totting up Olivia Marchant’s considerable generosity to me. I thought of how slowly but surely I had become more involved in her story. I dug out Belinda Balliol’s file and read it again. And again. I saw the number for the casino scribbled in the margin, and realized how it had been the perfect shortcut to her. I thought some more about her car and that coat and her life over the last six months. And gradually, in the same way that staring long enough at a negative allows you to invert the image and see a positive picture, I started to see things from Colin’s point of view, and to conclude that maybe this was a traditional detective story after all.