Our House

by Louise Candlish

  Yeah right.

  In the end, it was the eerie familiarity of the viewers that I most disliked; the wife radiating social ambition, the husband more cautious or at least better skilled at hiding his aspirations. He prided himself on his negotiator’s poker face, perhaps, just as I had all those moons ago. ‘I’ll beat them down,’ I’d told Fi of our divorcing teachers, and soon we were celebrating with champagne, thinking ourselves quite the conquering heroes.

  No, I would have preferred it to be a millionaire’s daughter from Beijing or a lottery winner from Burnley. Not Fi and me in a previous life.

  32

  ‘Fi’s Story’ > 01:55:30

  Saturday night’s Halloween party was traditionally the crowning glory of the trip. Custom decreed there be a large bowl of tinned lychees and another of spaghetti in tomato sauce, the blindfolded children taking it in turns to plunge their hands into the ‘eyeballs’ and ‘brains’ respectively. Then, vision restored and faces painted, they danced and screamed under spiders’ webs of fairy lights, ate cake with lurid green icing (slime) and drank cherry juice (vampire’s blood) through curly straws.

  It was the kids who were in costume, but when I looked in the mirror at the end of the evening I saw a transformation in myself too. In contravention of the laws of Halloween, I looked less ghoulish, more human. I’ve survived this, I thought. I feel good.

  Is it because adultery is not the worst crime in the world, not by a long shot? People are murdering each other out there, abusing the vulnerable and stealing from the elderly; there are bombed cities and drowned refugees. Why not forgive Bram, then – forgive him a second time?

  Because there’d be a third and a fourth and a fifth, that was why not. I extinguished the bathroom light and, with it, the thought.

  ‘Oh, Ali, it’s so beautiful here,’ Merle was saying, when I returned downstairs. Kirsty was supervising bedtime, the kids in rows of blow-up beds under the eaves. Bingo, Kirsty’s spaniel, and Alison’s Lab Rocky had passed out on the rug in the sitting room, no one fully sure what they might have ingested during the festivities.

  ‘We all helped make it nice,’ Alison said, surveying the debris over the top of her Prosecco glass.

  ‘Not the party stuff, the whole house. I wish I had your eye.’

  Merle had never been a house-proud type; not like Alison with her on-trend paint finishes and dawn raids on New Covent Garden Market for her flowers. I remember seeing Merle once trimming her fingernails with kitchen scissors, brushing the cuttings onto the floor. She’d exit the kitchen with handfuls of G & Ts and turn off the light switch with her nose. She was spontaneous, playful, with a joie de vivre I’d always envied.

  Still do.

  As she took a deep gulp of wine, as if quenching thirst with a soft drink, I noticed the liquid in her flute was more effervescent than ours, bubbles leaping from the surface. ‘You’re not drinking, Merle?’

  She pulled a face: the game was up. I sensed that she might have denied it had it been one of the others who’d asked. ‘Sparkling elderflower,’ she confessed.

  ‘Just this glass or the whole time?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘You snake,’ Alison gasped. ‘I can’t believe you’ve infiltrated our nest. What’s going on?’

  ‘Nothing exciting,’ Merle said, ‘I’ve just been going sober in October.’

  ‘Why? The charity thing?’

  ‘Not exactly. Maybe, I just liked the rhyme?’

  Alison snorted. This was too silly for Merle and she knew we knew that.

  ‘I’m never going sober,’ I said. I had an ancient instinct to protect her from further interrogation. ‘And I don’t care if Shakespeare said it in iambic pentameter . . .’

  ‘Oh, but you’re in a new relationship,’ Alison said. ‘That’s always a time of intoxication – in all senses of the word.’

  I chuckled. ‘In my experience, it’s the old relationships that drive us to drink.’

  Alison’s eye returned to Merle, who gazed past her to the clotted black world beyond the window.

  ‘Well, at least this is the last day of the month,’ Alison said, sighing.

  Bram, Word document

  After Rav and his sidekick had gone, I poured myself a vodka large enough to stun a farm animal and took a shower to scrub away the day’s toxins. The ingratiation and the avarice. The cold sweats. The strain. I’d arranged what I knew would be at best a distraction, at worst the introduction into my freakshow existence of another variable, another complication, another opportunity for regret.

  The doorbell rang. In the hall mirror I looked passably human, if you didn’t peer too closely.

  ‘What a beautiful house, Bram!’ my guest exclaimed. She wore black – for sex not for mourning – but it might have been the latter as far as I was concerned.

  ‘Funnily enough, you’re not the first to say that today,’ I said. I could tell there was something weird going on with my face, not as bad as once before, in front of Fi, when I’d thought I was having a stroke, but bad enough for my guest to notice.

  ‘What’s the matter? You look upset. Has something happened?’

  ‘No, nothing.’ A smile, the broadest I could muster, pushed the cracks to the edges. ‘Just a tiring day. Come in and let’s have a very large drink.’

  ‘I like a man with a plan,’ Saskia said.

  *

  ‘The clocks go back tonight,’ she said later, in bed, and it was inevitable that I would wish they could go back far longer than an hour. That they could take us back to September, undo everything that had been done. Maybe earlier than that. How much earlier? When I’d slept with that girl from work years ago, perhaps. Was that when the bindweed had started to grip?

  Jodie, she was called. She was young, only twenty-three or something crazy like that. I remember the feeling I had as I drove home from the hotel the next day, not guilt – at least not real guilt, as I now know it – but more a need to acknowledge my own disgrace. To mark the passing of one era to the next.

  ‘If you could choose, how far would you turn back the clock?’ I asked Saskia. ‘I don’t mean hours, I mean months or even years. Where would you stop?’

  ‘I wouldn’t,’ she said. ‘I don’t do regret. Seriously, it’s one of my life philosophies. Don’t look at me like that.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like you’ve suddenly realized I’m an alien.’

  ‘You’re not the alien,’ I said. ‘I am.’

  I kissed her again, not only because that was why she was here but also to end the conversation, which was getting maudlin and in danger of giving me away. She must have sensed some new element of yearning, though, because she broke off and said, ‘What is this, Bram?’

  ‘What’s what?’

  ‘This. Tonight.’

  Oh God. Already. ‘What do you want it to be?’ I said.

  She sighed, clearly understanding that I’d used this line before, that it was the only answer I was likely to give. At least she’d known what she was dealing with coming here tonight: a soon-to-be-divorced philanderer with a criminal record. The published version of myself I felt almost nostalgic for now.

  Really, it was amazing I’d lasted as long as I had.

  33

  Friday, 13 January 2017

  London, 3 p.m.

  Police constables Elaine Bird and Adam Miah have arrived and all available seating at the Vaughans’ kitchen table is taken, every one of their moving-day tea mugs now in use. Lucy has asked Fi’s advice about the central heating system, because it’s starting to get draughty (apparently there’s even the possibility of snow tonight) and it seemed churlish not to show her how it worked.

  The movers have long gone, their vans leaving in convoy. David wasn’t so flustered as to forget their tip and Fi imagines them in the pub spending it, saying to one another, ‘That was a weird one, wasn’t it? Who was that other woman? The one they couldn’t get rid of?’

  The formal state of affairs is t
his: Bram is not missing, or, rather, an adult has a legal right to disappear himself and there is not yet any good reason to believe this particular one is not safe and well and exactly where he wants to be. After all, they haven’t even checked his second residence (he’s not going to be there kicking back with an episode of Game of Thrones, Fi can tell them that for nothing) or he might be with another family member.

  ‘There’s only his mother,’ Fi says. ‘I’ve tried, and he’s not with her.’

  ‘A friend, then, or a work colleague? And you might ring around the local hospitals.’

  David Vaughan says he personally volunteers to put Bram in hospital, if he is not in there already, but he’s misjudged his audience and the joke is cooly received.

  ‘If you still haven’t located him by Monday,’ PC Elaine Bird tells Fi, ‘and you have good reason to think he might have come to harm, get back in touch.’

  The same circumspection is applied to the group’s house-sale crisis. Like Bram, the proceeds of the sale are not technically missing, or even in dispute, not until deposits into his account are inspected. No fraud has taken place, at least not until it has been logged with Action Fraud and referred for investigation to Falcon, the Met’s fraud and cybercrime unit. Meanwhile, if there is any suspicion that either of the solicitors have been negligent, the aggrieved party might consider contacting the Solicitors Regulation Authority. (That’s what Fi is now, the aggrieved party.)

  ‘Conveyancing fraud is on the rise,’ PC Miah says. ‘You’ve probably seen it in the news lately, have you? We’ve just issued a statement urging estate agents and solicitors to be more vigilant, especially when sending bank details via email, which is when fraudsters tend to intercept. Typically, it happens when a tenant is in the property and they’ve never met the owner, so they’re less likely to question visits by agents and surveyors.’

  ‘This is different, though,’ David points out. ‘This has been done with the co-operation of one of the owners.’

  ‘We don’t know that for sure,’ Fi objects. ‘Like Merle said, Bram might have been acting under duress.’

  ‘That’s why we called you,’ Merle tells the officers. ‘This house fraud and Bram’s disappearance are clearly linked. We’re worried he might be the victim of professional criminals.’

  ‘We’ve been through this,’ David says. ‘We met the guy at the open house. No one had a gun to his head. All the documents and questionnaires were signed by him. It will be simple enough to get the signatures verified, won’t it?’ he asks PC Miah.

  ‘If and when we decide to investigate, yes.’

  ‘He must have let our surveyor in as well,’ Lucy says. ‘He came in December, I can check the date.’

  ‘I’m sure when you hear from your solicitors, they’ll be able to shed light on the situation,’ PC Bird tells them, and it seems to Fi it’s as if she and her colleague are mediating a dispute about parking or loud music rather than responding to a report of serious crime.

  ‘But if they don’t,’ David insists, ‘you can’t expect us to wait months for it to be referred and investigated, can you? We need to know who has the right to live in this house now. Today and tomorrow and the foreseeable future.’

  ‘Fi, obviously,’ Merle says.

  ‘Then give us back our two million,’ David snaps. Lucy gives him a look as if to say, Don’t get nasty. When all of this is resolved she’ll be our new neighbour. We’ll want to invite her to our barbecues and Christmas drinks. Her kids might babysit ours.

  Fi looks around the table and has the perverse urge to laugh. Not just chuckle but scream. It’s surreal, absurd. The fact is they have no facts. Bram is missing, the solicitors are unavailable. It’s as if they’ve made the whole thing up. No wonder the officers are so keen to depart, kindly advising a follow-up call on Monday ‘when we know more’.

  Lucy and Merle see them out together, uneasy co-hosts, and no sooner has the front door closed than David’s phone rings. ‘Finally, Rav!’ he exclaims and leaves the room.

  ‘Rav is the estate agent,’ Lucy explains to Fi and Merle.

  ‘I still don’t understand how an agent managed the sale,’ Merle says. ‘I’ve never seen this house listed on any of the property sites. I look regularly.’

  ‘It was done through the private sales department,’ Lucy says. ‘We were registered with another agent there and Rav just phoned us out of the blue, said a new property on Trinity Avenue had come up.’

  I had a chance to stop this, Fi thinks. She uses the downstairs bathroom, her fingers touching the smooth lip of the basin, the shiny curves of the taps. The toilet roll is patterned with a puppy motif, Harry’s choice, but the soap and hand towel are the Vaughans’. Afterwards, she lingers in the hall, which is stacked with boxes and fold-up chairs, and runs her hands over the chalky walls, the polished banister rail. The lights are out in all rooms except the kitchen; if you walked by the house now, you wouldn’t know it has changed hands. You wouldn’t know one family had been replaced by another. She has a strange thought then: does the house still mean to her what it used to? Hasn’t she already started to think of it as disputed territory? Hasn’t she known, subconsciously, that in the end the bird’s nest would topple and someone, if not all of them, risked being wounded? Maybe the fall has simply come sooner than she imagined.

  In the kitchen, their war room, there is a temporary armistice between Merle and Lucy, a regathering of energies as they await the news from David’s phone call. Lucy has produced biscuits and is eating one with nervous speed. Fi sees her eye Merle’s clothing, consider making a comment, decide against it. She takes a biscuit too, chews, tastes nothing.

  In the lull, Merle’s phone pings constantly with updates (Alison has collected Robbie and Daisy from school for her and taken them home for tea. Adrian is away on a skiing holiday with old university friends). In contrast, Fi’s has not rung once since she arrived. The only incoming communications have been texts from her mother asking after the boys and one from Clara at work, who reassures her the presentation document has been found after all and there is no need to go out of her way to send it. (‘Sorry to interrupt your romantic break!’) Whatever the presentation was, Fi’s brain has erased it, Clara’s words as unintelligible as if they were from some lost tongue.

  When David returns, he looks for the first time quite shaken. ‘This is getting out of control.’

  ‘What, it wasn’t before?’ Merle says, straight back to her feet, punches ready.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Lucy asks. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Rav says Mrs Lawson has been on the phone in a panic. She says the funds haven’t arrived in her account, even though we all had confirmation from both solicitors that completion took place, which was why he released the keys to us this morning.’

  Fi stops breathing.

  ‘She’s spoken to Graham Jenson, so at least we know he’s back in contact, but he’s insisting everything’s gone through okay and she just needs to keep checking her account. Apparently, she hasn’t been able to track down her husband—’

  ‘Bram’s not her husband,’ Merle corrects him. ‘Can we please all agree on that? Whoever this woman is, she has absolutely no claim to this house.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Lucy says. ‘What does that mean in terms of the money?’

  David turns his palms upwards. ‘Well, it means either there’s been some technical glitch with the transfer and, like Jenson says, it will resolve itself any minute . . .’

  ‘Or?’ Merle prompts.

  ‘Or – and this seems more likely since we had confirmation of completion hours ago – the money’s been transferred to the wrong account. And that means yet more complications.’

  Fi makes a choking noise.

  ‘Fi?’ Merle says. ‘Are you okay?’

  Still she can’t seem to breathe. Mrs Lawson, David said. She called the agent. She can’t get hold of her husband. She needs to check her account.

  Whatever Bram’s done,
he’s done it with another person. A woman.

  At last, she exhales.

  Of course a woman.

  Geneva, 4 p.m.

  Though the train station for services to France is seven kilometres from the hotel, he has decided to walk. This way he can weave and dive and double back, shake off any interested party. Exhaust himself too, with any luck.

  Instinct causes him to reach for his phone for navigation before he remembers he has no connectivity, having disabled every digital means of drawing the authorities to him. What he does have, however, is an old-style fold-out map; he did not arrive here a free-and-easy tourist, content to go with the flow. He knows from his research – indeed, it is one of the reasons he chose Geneva as his starting point – that passports are not checked at railway stations here because all countries that border Switzerland are in the Schengen Agreement.

  Countries like France. Cities like Lyon, where he’s never been before but which he has earmarked as being sizeable enough to absorb him, easy enough to shop for food and drink in bars without standing out from the crowd. It’s not what you’d call leading the police a merry dance, but it’s a decent attempt at misdirection: if some observant soul at Gatwick recognized his mugshot, if he were to be traced to Geneva, the trail would be suspended here while he slipped away there. It might buy him a few weeks.

  ‘Hideout’, ‘mugshot’, ‘police trail’: these are the sorts of words he used to use with his sons in their elaborate set-ups in the garden – cops and robbers, spies and double agents – but there’s no fun to be had now.

  He’s fairly certain he’s thrown off his pursuer – if there ever was one.

  Soon, the chill from Lake Geneva meets his newly cropped head and the fact that he is even registering the pain of a late afternoon in sub-zero winter feels perversely like progress.

  34

  ‘Fi’s Story’ > 01:59:07

  Did no one else suspect Bram of anything criminal back then, even if I did not? That’s right, my mother helped us with childcare and was probably in and out of Trinity Avenue more than anyone else, but certainly not her, no. I would go so far as to say that not only was she oblivious to any illegalities but she also privately wished for a reunion between us. Not that she had any desire to see her daughter humiliated, of course, it was just that she regarded his second infidelity as I had regarded the first: not excusable, but maybe, just possibly, pardonable.