by Nicci French
“He's going to be irritated,” I said.
He was very irritated.
The phone rang. It was Josh and Harry, calling from America, early morning for them, although they sounded as if they were just round the corner and at any moment would come charging into the house. Harry told me he had caught a pike, whatever that is, in the lake and he had learned how to sailboard. Josh asked me how things were at home; his voice jumped from boy's to man's, the way it does when he's overemotional.
“Fine, darling.”
“Are the police still there?”
“I think they're making progress.”
A little gust of hope blew through me.
“Do we have to stay out here another two weeks?”
“Don't be silly, darling, you're having a lovely time. Have you got enough money to last?”
“Yes, but—”
“And did I pack the right clothes? Oh, and remember to tell Harry that there are spare batteries for his Walkman in your backpack.”
“Yeah.”
I put the phone down feeling the conversation hadn't been a success. Christo trailed past, dragging a blanket after him. I felt a sharp pang of guilt when I saw his blotchy, sullen face.
“Hello, Christo,” I said to him. “Can Mummy have a hug?”
He turned to me.
“I'm not Christo,” he said. “I'm Alexander. And you're not my mummy.” Lena called to him from his room in her singsong Swedish accent and he raised his yellow head. “Coming, Mummy,” he shouted, darting a glance of triumph at me as he went.
I changed my trousers for a yellow, low-waisted sundress and threaded earrings into my lobes. I looked in the mirror. I wasn't wearing any makeup. My face was thin and pale, my hair was a mess, my eyes were oddly bright although the skin under them was all papery and frail, and there was a long red scratch on my cheek. How had that got there? I hardly recognized myself anymore.
Dr. Schilling ordered me to eat the omelette that she made, using the herbs I'd been saving for dinner after the drinks party. Never mind. I ate it in a few forkfuls, hardly chewing it, stuffing in brown, slightly stale bread after each rapid mouthful. I hadn't realized how famished I was. She watched me as I ate, leaning her chin on a hand, staring at me as if I puzzled her. Soon, I thought, I would get control back, clean the house, bring back the workmen, the gardener, the cleaner, take a deep breath and find the energy to be Jenny Hintlesham all over again. Tomorrow. I would begin again tomorrow. But just for this once, there was something pleasantly anesthetizing about being looked after. It no longer felt like my own house, just a place I was sitting in, waiting for something to happen; everyone was waiting for something to happen.
My eyes clicked open. A key in the lock, a door slamming loudly, heavy footsteps in the hall.
“Jenny. Jens, where are you?”
Grace Schilling stood up at the same time as me. Stadler and Links were there before us. We all converged by the staircase.
“What's going on?” Clive scowled; his voice was loud and abrupt; it made my head ache. At that moment he saw a box of his precious documents on the hall floor. I saw a vein pulsing angrily in his forehead.
“Mr. Hintlesham,” said Stadler. “Thanks for coming.” He was much taller than Clive, who looked square and hot next to him.
“Yes?”
He was talking to Stadler as if he were a particularly low-grade functionary.
“We'd prefer it if you could come with us,” said Links.
Clive stared.
“What do you mean?” he said. “Why not here?”
“We want to take a statement. It would be better.”
Clive looked at his watch.
“For God's sake,” he said. “This had better be important.”
“Please,” said Stadler, holding open the door for Clive, who turned to me before leaving.
“Phone Jan and tell her something,” he snapped at me. “Anything that doesn't make us both look stupid. And Becky. Go to that party and make sure you are jolly, as if everything is perfectly normal, do you hear?” I put a hand on his arm but he shook it off violently. “I am sick of this,” he said. “Utterly sick.”
Grace Schilling went too, buttoning up her long jacket purposefully before striding out the door.
I rang Clive's office and told Jan that Clive had a bad back. “Again?” she said sarcastically, which I didn't understand at all. I told Becky Richards the same, two hours later, and she laughed sympathetically. “Men are such hypochondriacs, aren't they?” She sniggered.
I looked round the room, at all the women in their black dresses and all the men in their dark suits. I knew most of them by sight, at least, but suddenly I couldn't summon up the energy to talk to them. I couldn't think of a single thing I had to say. I felt quite empty.
TWELVE
Clive didn't arrive and I felt more and more out of place standing there fiddling with the glass in my hand, looking at pictures in hand, walking from one room to another as if I were urgently on my way to meet someone, somewhere. I realized, almost with a feeling of horror, that being at a party on my own had become an utterly unfamiliar experience. It felt wrong, too. I've sometimes joked with Clive that when I go out to a party with him I know that it's really him people want to see and that I'm really there as Mrs. Clive.
So it was a relief rather than a hideous embarrassment when Becky told me there was someone at the door for me.
“A policeman,” she said with awkward puzzled delicacy.
Because we all know what the idea of a policeman at the door means for ordinary people like us: There's been an accident, a death, a disappearance. But I wasn't an ordinary person like them anymore. I went to the door feeling unworried. Stadler was there on the doorstep with a uniformed officer I hadn't seen before. Becky hovered for a moment, helpful and nosy. The officer didn't speak and I turned and looked questioningly at Becky.
“If there's anything I can do, I'll be inside,” she said and moved back, reluctantly.
I turned back to the officer.
“Sorry to bother you,” he said. “I was sent to tell you that your husband won't be along. Mr. Hintlesham's still being interviewed.”
“Oh,” I said. “Is anything the matter?”
“We're just trying to clear up some details.”
We stood there on Becky's doorstep looking at each other.
“I don't really want to go back to the party,” I said.
“We can run you back home, if you like,” Stadler said. Then he said: “Jenny,” and I blushed violently.
“I'll get my coat.”
Nobody spoke to me on the short drive back. Stadler and the officer murmured to each other once or twice. Back at the house, Stadler walked up the steps with me. As I turned the key in the lock it felt for an absurd moment as if the two of us were coming back from an evening out together and we were saying good night.
“Will Clive be back this evening?” I said firmly as if to show myself how stupid that was.
“I'm not sure,” Stadler said.
“What are you talking to him about?”
“We need him to corroborate some details of the investigation.” Stadler looked around casually while speaking. “Oh, and there's one other thing. As part of this extra push in the inquiry, we would like to conduct a more detailed search of your house tomorrow morning. Do you have any objection to that?”
“I don't suppose so. I can't believe there's anything left to look at. Where do you want to search?”
Stadler looked casual again.
“Different places. Some of the upstairs. Maybe your husband's study.”
Clive's study. It had been the first room we made habitable in the new house, which was a bit rich because nobody inhabited it except Clive. Wherever we had lived, Clive always insisted on that: a room that was his private lair, for his own stuff. When we were planning the rooms for the new lair, I remember protesting with a laugh that I didn't have a sanctum and he said that didn't matter bec
ause the whole house was my sanctum.
The room wasn't exactly kept locked and bolted, but it hardly needed to be. The boys were strictly forbidden on penalty of torture and death from even entering the room. I wasn't absolutely excluded, obviously. I'd sometimes go in while Clive was working on the accounts or writing letters and he wouldn't get cross with me or tell me to go away. But he would turn toward me, take the coffee or hear what I had to say, and then wait until I was finished and started to go. He always said that he couldn't work if I was in the room.
So there was a feeling of something forbidden when—after checking round the house, getting undressed, and putting on my nightie and dressing gown—I went into the study. I put the light on and straightaway felt guilty, walking across the room and pulling the curtains shut so that I truly felt alone there, at almost midnight.
The room was Clive. Neat, precise, well ordered, almost bare. There were just a few pictures. A small blurry watercolor of a sailing boat he had inherited from his mother. An old etching of his public school that he'd been given as a boy. There was a photograph of Clive with a group of his colleagues at a celebration dinner, all cigars and red shiny faces and empty glasses and arms round shoulders, with Clive looking just a little hunted and awkward. He was never happy being touched, especially by other men.
My husband's study. What was there here that could possibly be of any interest? I wasn't going to search through his things, of course. The idea of doing that while he was away at the police station would have seemed terribly disloyal. I just wanted to have a look. It might be important if I had to speak on his behalf. That's what I told myself.
The study contained two filing cabinets, one tall and brown, the other short, stubby gray metal. I opened them both and flicked through the folders and papers, but they were incredibly boring. Mortgage documents, instruction booklets, endless receipts and bills and guarantees, invoices, accountants' letters. It made me feel a small glow of love for Clive. This was what he did so that I didn't have to. He let me do just the interesting, creative part, and he did all this. And it was all done, all arranged. There was nothing pending, no bill unpaid, no letter unanswered. What could I ever have done without him? I didn't look at the individual pieces of paper. I just wanted to check that there was no file containing anything that wasn't boring.
I closed the second filing cabinet. It was all so stupid. There was nothing here that could possibly be of any interest to the police unless they wanted to read through our mortgage agreement. Just more misdirected effort. I could have told them if they'd only asked me.
I rolled back the top of the desk. It made a horrible noise and I looked round nervously. I was careful not to do anything that couldn't be undone in a few seconds if the front door were to ring. Nothing of interest, needless to say. Clive always said that one of his strictest rules was always to clear his desk before he got up from it. There was nothing on the work surface but pens, pencils, erasers, a rather expensive electric pencil sharpener, rubber bands, paper clips, all in some container or dish specially meant for them. There were pigeonholes with envelopes, notepaper, cards, labels. If nothing else, the police would certainly be impressed.
All that remained were the drawers. I sat at his chair. Above my knees was a shallow drawer. Picture postcards. I examined them. All blank. Then the drawers on either side. Checkbooks, new and empty. Holiday brochures for the winter. A whole lot of paperwork from Matheson Jeffries, where Clive works. All blessedly tedious.
The bottom right-hand drawer contained some large, bulky, brown envelopes. I examined the top one. It was full of handwritten letters. The same handwriting. I looked at the end of one of them. It was a long letter on three sheets of paper. Signed Gloria. I knew that one of the wrongest things you can do is to read anybody's private letters without their permission. “Nobody ever overhears good about themselves” was a saying that came into my mind. I knew I mustn't read them and what I really ought to do was to put them back and go to bed and put all this out of my mind. At the same time it occurred to me that in the morning the police might be reading these letters for reasons of their own. Shouldn't I have some idea of what they contained?
I compromised by skimming the letters and looking at a phrase here and a word there. It may seem difficult to make sense of letters in that way, but words seemed to jump up off the page at me: darling . . . I miss you desperately . . . thoughts of last night . . . counting the hours. Funnily enough, my initial feeling was not anger against Clive or even against Gloria. At first I just felt contemptuous at the triteness of her letters. Do people having secret affairs have to express themselves in the same old hackneyed phrases? Couldn't Clive do better than that? Then I thought of her at dinner when I had last seen her, leaning over to whisper something to him, looking over the table at him, and my cheeks burned. I carefully put the letters back in the envelope. The last letter was the most recent. I shouldn't have read them; it would do nothing but harm, cause more pain, more humiliation.
Just one more bit. One paragraph, not just a phrase. I would allow Gloria a paragraph to do herself justice. The last one of that most recent letter. I needed to know where I stood.
“And now I must close, my darling. I'm writing this at work and it's time to go home. I can't bear not seeing you, but in September we'll have Geneva.” Geneva. A business trip. He hadn't mentioned that yet. “It seems awful to admit, but sometimes I hate her too, nearly as much as you.”
I laid the letter down for a moment and swallowed hard, but the lump in my throat wouldn't go away. Hated me. So he hated me. Not loved. Not even liked. Not indifferent. Hated. I looked down at the letter again. “But we mustn't. We'll work things out and be together somehow. We will find a way, I trusted you when you said that. All my loveliest love, Gloria.”
I folded the letter and slipped it into the large brown envelope carefully, at the bottom, where it was meant to be. I looked at the other stuffed envelopes in the drawer, and even the thought of what they contained filled me with such desolation. I lifted the top one and underneath it was a photograph. It was a woman but it wasn't Gloria. She looked as if she was at a party. She was holding a drink and she was raising it to the photographer in a jokey way and laughing. She looked different from any woman I knew. Fun. Small and slim and very young. Dark blond hair, short skirt, strange all-over-the-place blouse. But all quite casual-looking. I thought for a mad moment that she looked nice, that she could have been my friend, and then I felt angry and sick and I couldn't bear any more. I put the photograph back under the second bundle and closed the drawer. I left the room, remembering to switch off the light.
THIRTEEN
I was in the dark. My life was the dark place. Everything I had once taken for granted now loomed over me, horrible. I had thought there was someone out there who wanted to harm me, and that had seemed terrifying enough, but now I realized nowhere was safe. Not out there, not in here, not with the person I had been married to for fifteen years, not in my own house, my own room, my own bed. Nowhere.
Josh and Harry were in America, in some tent up a mountain, far from home. Christo was pretending I wasn't his mother at all. And Clive hated me; that's what he had said to Gloria. Lying in bed that night, I tested that word, like testing a battery by laying the tip of your tongue against it. Hated. Hated. Hated. The word stung in my brain. My husband hated me. How long, I wondered, had he hated me? Since Gloria, or for years and years? Always?
Outside, there was a faint sigh of wind in the limp trees. I imagined eyes out there, watching my window.
Maybe my husband wanted me dead.
I sat up in bed, turned on the light beside me. That was ridiculous. Mad, a mad thing to think. Except, why were the police holding him for so long?
At dawn, after a night of jumbled dreams, I went into Christo's room and sat beside him while he slept. Light was filtering in through his fish curtains; it was going to be another scorching day. He had thrown off his covers and his pajama top was unbuttoned. The f
luffy dolphin that Lena had bought him at the zoo was clasped in one fist. His mouth was slightly open and every so often he mumbled something incomprehensible. Today, I thought, I would arrange to send him with Lena to my parents. I should have done it before. This was no place for a child to be.
The police arrived early, three of them, who moved into Clive's study like a task force. I pretended they weren't there.
I made Christo and Lena a cooked breakfast, though Lena, who never ate anything, merely picked at the grilled tomato with her fork and tried to push the rest of it into a pile so it would look as if she'd eaten some. And Christo, after piercing the yolk of the fried egg and smearing it round his plate, said it was all yuck and couldn't he have his chocolate flakes instead? What was the magic word? I asked automatically. Please. Please could he not eat this disgusting mess.
The police left, carrying boxes. It was just a few months since they'd all been brought in and piled high at random by a group of surly and resentful removal men. Christo didn't ask where his father was, because Clive was usually gone before he woke up anyway. Gone before he woke up, back after he had gone to sleep. Hated. My husband hated me.
The kitchen was a mess. The whole house was a mess now that I'd sent Mary off. I'd clean it tomorrow. Not today. I looked down at my bare legs. They needed waxing again, I thought, and my nail varnish was beginning to chip.
“Are you all right, Mrs. Hintlesham?” Lena asked me in her singsong voice. What a pretty girl she was, so blond and slim in her tiny sundress, her delicate arms tanned from the summer. Maybe Clive had thought so too. I stared at her until her face swam.
“Mrs. Hintlesham?”
“Fine.” I put my fingers against my face; my skin felt thin and old. “I slept badly. . . .” I trailed off.
“I want to watch the cartoons.”
“Not now, Christo.”
“I want to watch cartoons!”