“Have you slept?”
“Gaby, I am in full control of my faculties.”
He sat on the edge of the table, his trousers wrinkled from travel, the same handsome, youthful Philip. But I just looked at him. It was peculiar. I felt detached. I didn’t even feel angry anymore. It had calcified into something duller. I couldn’t put my finger on it. This was everything I had longed for, but it felt wrong, off-key, too late. I had got through all this on my own, without him, and it had changed something. I didn’t know if I could change it back. Was all this outpouring of emotion about me, or was it actually more about him? And a “boat trip?” That was worth mentioning? He kept talking, a stream of words: “I buggered off to the other side of the world, despite your trauma. I wasn’t here to support you when the police were badgering you . . .”
“Arresting me, in fact.”
“You kept it together, as you always do.”
“I spent a night in a cell. Philip. In a cell!”
“Oh my God. They kept you in? Overnight?”
“Yes.” Surely he knew this? “A whole night.”
He takes a sharp intake of breath. “Was it awful?”
“Actually,” I decide to say “it was fine. I survived.”
“You poor darling. I don’t deserve you.” I noticed a vein in the delicate skin under one of his eyes. “I’m a worthless piece of shit.”
“Be careful with the self-flagellation,” I said, “or it might start being about you again.”
He turned his head a fraction and pressed his fingers between his eyes, pushing down on the bridge of his nose.
The familiarity of the gesture stirred something in me. Philip always does this, grip his nose, when he is tired—as if he thinks he can squeeze the tiredness out. I moved toward him and kissed him full on the mouth, which is a place that had felt out of bounds for a while. I was trying it out for size. He spread his palm across the back of my head. I could feel the pressure of his teeth against my lips. Then he took my hand and pulled me out of the kitchen, past Marta’s closed door, and up the stairs to our room.
His body is as familiar to me as my own. I know where the bones protrude and the skin has begun to wrinkle, where a mole has grown and where muscles have firmed. I was shy at first—the mortification of sex after a period without, the embarrassment—but it was not like Brighton. A part of me looked down, imagining the conversation I might have with Clara. Words like engaged, attentive, considerate. I could feel the force of Philip’s emotion. It wasn’t passion precisely; it was something different.
• • •
I turn, a dolphin flipping, to study his face. His stubble is white-tipped, paler on the chin than above his mouth, a bit like Perivale’s, though that’s a thought I wish I hadn’t had. Skin flaking on the side of his nose, the odd hair that needs plucking. An age spot blooms on his temple—is that new? The smell of peppermint.
“You’ve brushed your teeth,” I say. “Cheat.”
“I was in the bathroom and I saw my advantage!” He looks at me seriously. “I’m going to make an effort, Gaby.”
“Starting with teeth.”
“Starting with teeth.”
I consider him for a moment.
Philip sneezes suddenly, as if the attention is too intense. “Sorry. Hay fever.”
He sneezes again, and this time makes the conductor thing with the invisible baton. Something tweaks in my heart, when he does that, deep in the muscle.
I prop myself up on my elbow. “We have become very distant,” I say.
“I know.” He slips down next to me, folds a pillow into a bolster behind his shoulders, gazes into my eyes. “So while I was away, tell me everything that happened. Go through everything. So the police kept you in, the bastards, and then decided to leave you alone, thank God. What else?”
I open my mouth to speak, but I close it again. I don’t know where to start. I should want to tell him everything, shouldn’t I? It should all come gushing out, and I should cry and he should comfort me and beat himself up again for not having been here. He’ll be horrified when he hears the details—how intimidating the police were, how sinister Perivale’s obsession, how menacing the stalker, how bloody lonely a custody cell is at night. I fantasized about this moment at the beginning, imagined the guilt Philip would feel, how perhaps he might love me a tiny bit more. But something fundamental has changed. I don’t know where to begin. I feel as if I am treading water in a storm.
Eventually, I say, “Work hasn’t been great actually.”
“I thought they had given you a few days off to recover?”
He seems genuinely not to know. Perhaps I have maligned him. I half laugh. “Not sure that’s quite how I would put it.”
I start to explain about Terri’s awkwardness on the phone, the leaks to the press, the fact no one will return my calls, the conviction I have that they have pushed me out. I’m aware as I am talking that this isn’t what really matters, but it seems easier somehow, for now, than telling him about anything else.
“They can’t do that,” he says.
“Everyone’s expendable, Philip.”
“We’ll fight, don’t you worry. I’ll get on to Steven at Witherspoons. If they won’t have you back, it’ll be unfair dismissal, plus defamation of character. They don’t stand a chance against Steven. He’ll have Terri fired within the week.”
Here it is. Philip back and fighting for me. Why don’t I feel better? Also I don’t want Terri fired. As a response, it’s so bullish, so lacking in empathy, so him.
He strokes my hair. I have to fight the instinct to pull away.
“Tell me about your trip,” I say.
He leans back, fiddles with the pillow to make himself more comfortable. He talks about going long and going short and the importance in the current market of being trade orientated, of meetings with CEOs and optic companies, and the effect of fraud and the tanking of shares. It is a bit like his lovemaking. He continues to deploy engagement and consideration. He is attentive in the retelling.
“Meet any interesting people?” I ask. “Eat any good food?”
“Few posh restaurants, lot of wining and dining, mainly international.” He shrugs, and for a moment I think about how Jack would have answered—some forensic description of a bean curd mee goreng probably.
“My poor darling,” he says.
My poor darling.
Philip yawns, shakes his head as if clearing his ears. He slips down. His eyes half close. He is not going to ask any more, I realize, about my ordeal. His hand is stroking my leg. I’m wondering whether to tell him now about the stalker, I’ve Been Watching You 2, the VIPER at the police station, when my mobile rings. It’s in the pocket of my jeans, and they vibrate against the floor as if harboring a creature.
“Leave it,” Philip says.
“It might be Millie.”
I lean over, dig my hand into the pocket, and bring the phone to my ear just in time.
“Gaby!”
“Oh, hello.” I should have left it. I don’t want to speak to Jack now.
“I need to meet you,” he says. “Can I come round? Something big has happened.”
I am already half over the bed, the mattress pressing into my stomach, and I slither a tiny bit farther, dig my elbow into the floor for balance. “It’s not ideal timing,” I say brightly. “My husband has just returned from a business trip. Can it wait?”
“He’s back? Philip is back? No. It can’t. It’s really urgent.”
“Urgent? Really?” I turn and ham disbelief at Philip, who rolls his eyes.
“Okay. Look, I’ll tell you quickly. I’ve just been back to Christa’s flat. I begged to see Ania’s journals. She was cagey, but I got to the bottom of it. She’s basically not paying any tax, petrified of being deported. I had to go on a full-out charm offensive, telling her I’d sort it out with HM Revenue and Customs for her while vaguely threatening to inform on her if she didn’t play ball. Not pretty, but needs must.”
>
“That sounds a bit brutal.”
“Thing is, Gaby, it worked. She agreed to show me, though they are in Polish, so it’s not that much of a help. Anyway, the point is—”
“Yes. I’m not sure any of those times is convenient,” I say.
Philip has started kissing my toes.
“Gotcha. Listen, I did get Christa to check. Last year—the thirteenth of August, two thirty PM. Your name, your address. It’s in her diary, Gaby. She did come for an interview. It’s down there. You might have forgotten, but you did see her, Gaby. It’s written in her diary. She came to your house.”
• • •
As soon as I can, I throw on some clothes and go downstairs to make tea. I tell Philip I will brew it properly—warm the pot and let it steep. “None of your dipping in and out, your squeezing against the side,” I say, “your casual, callous treatment of a tea bag.”
“Steep away,” he says lazily. “I’m going to have a shower, try and wake myself up. Got to keep going or I’ll never sleep tonight.”
I stand in the kitchen and look about me. I’m getting my bearings. I mustn’t panic. I mustn’t hurry. My cereal bowl has been cleared from the table. The J-cloth hangs in a wet rectangle over the arch of the tap. The kettle is hot to the touch. Marta is obviously still in the house, though I can’t hear any sounds.
I put the kettle on and start searching. Last year’s household diary: it was a pale blue Smythson with gold-crinkled silk pages—a present from the big cheeses at work. I can visualize it, almost reach it in my mind. Did I give it to the police? No, they never asked about it.
It isn’t in the pile of books by the TV and it isn’t on the shelves in the sitting room, or nestling among Millie’s grade two piano music.
The pump for the hot water emits its whistling metallic crank; the pipes in the wall begin to hum.
I start spinning from surface to surface. I’m not so calm now. Has it been recycled? Did we throw it away? Could it be in the bedroom? Have I time, while he is in the shower, to run back upstairs and look?
Then an image, a visual memory: Jack picking up a book and putting it back, running his fingers along the spines. And yes, there it is—not hidden, not buried, but on display, lined up neatly alongside the shiny cookbooks Philip’s mother gives me in hope, every Christmas, just sitting there between Jamie at Home and Claudia Roden’s The Food of Spain.
A spider is curled on the upper spine. I blow it off. The leather cover smells of dust and cooking grease. The pages are soft as butter.
I find the page: Saturday 13 August. The date is filled with scrawls. Millie had a gym competition in Dagenham—“Warm-up 8:30 AM. Main event 9:15 AM Izzie’s mother taking”—and a party in the afternoon—“Harriet Pugh’s 8th: Sammy Duder Pottery, Webb’s Road, 4–6 PM.” I’ve scribbled, “BUY PRESENT!!!!” in underlined capitals across the space, too, so it’s not surprising this other thing got missed. No writing, just the vague dent of pencil marks long erased. You have to hold the book up to catch the light to make them out. No name, no details, just a shape “2:30 PM: AD”—hidden in all these other hieroglyphics.
I stare at it. It comes in and out of focus. I flick the pages back. The previous week is full of neat, firmly penciled numbers and letters. On Monday is written “6:30 PM: CS. 7 PM: PT.” The Armenian from Croydon and the off-to-uni-any-minute student. On Tuesday, it says, “7 PM: NM. 7:30 PM: NS. 8 PM: PB.” The nondriver, the male South African, and the lovely Portuguese with no English. Then on Wednesday, “5:30 PM: MB.” Marta Biely, a competent, well-rounded Polish nanny with excellent references.
I had spoken to Robin on the way to the hospital to see my mother. I remember that. I asked her to call off my appointments for the week, reschedule a dinner and a trip to the dentist. She said she would sort it. I could leave it in her hands. She was preoccupied with the wedding, though—some last-minute hitch: the chairs in the marquee were too wide. Had she tried to get through to Ania and then failed? Had she never got to even that? Had Ania come all the same?
I slide the diary back in between the cookbooks. This is everything and nothing. It is not proof. Explanations: they’re just out there, waiting to be plucked.
I think about the week my mother died. Those last few months were a fresh kind of hell. Police. Doctors. Interventions. Vodka decanted into vases. Miniatures in the medicine cabinet. Inappropriate men passed out on the sofa. Philip, who had found my mother “such a character,” was nauseated by the raw savagery of it. I didn’t make him do anything he didn’t want to do. I went to the hospital that last time on my own. Her skin was jaundiced, the whites of her eyes like yolks. Her bloated fingers shuffled invisible cards. She had picked at the sores on her arms and the scabs on the backs of her hands until they bled. Her abdomen was distended beneath the sheet. When she vomited into the kidney-shaped bowl I held, blood ran from her nose like snot.
She told the nurses I had set upon her, pulled her hair, beaten her black and blue. “An unnatural daughter,” she spat. I stroked her back until she slept. When she woke, she vomited black clots.
Philip wasn’t with me when she died. “My darling,” he said on the phone the following day, “my poor darling.” He sent flowers, a neat posy of carnations and alstroemeria. He was late for the funeral, came straight to the crematorium from “a work thing,” tiptoed in.
The kettle clicks off and I jump. The hot-water pump jolts and quiets. I hear the overflow hissing down the pipes in the wall.
I have started pouring water into the teapot when the phone rings. The cradle on the side table in the snug corner of the kitchen is empty—the receiver is by the bed upstairs—but the spare one is buried in the sofa cushions. When I press the button to answer, I think I hear a distant click.
“Hello, Mum! We’re at a service station. I’m having lunch and it’s not even lunchtime. Sausages, and what do you think is nicest: chips, sauté or buttery mash? I’m going for chips because Robin says they probably don’t use real butter.”
“More like I Can’t Believe It’s Not Buttery Mash,” I say. I had forgotten. Millie and Robin. It’s Wednesday. Ob-gyn. Millie is on her way home. I’m about to see Millie. “Or. Margariney Spread Mash.”
“Really disgusting anyway. Have you recorded House of Anubis? Robin and Ian don’t have Nickelodeon and I have to find out what happened. I need to, Mum.”
“Mills?”
“Hang on. Robin wants to talk to you.”
“Millie. Can I ask you something?”
“Okay.”
I walk with the phone to the window. “Can you remember back to last summer, the weekend I was with Granny in hospital, the weekend before you were a bridesmaid at Robin’s wedding?”
“Ye-es,” she says doubtfully.
Most of the garden is in shadow, but the camellia is still out. “You had a gym competition in the morning and Harriet Pugh’s decorate-your-own-pottery party in the afternoon.”
“The one where they spelled my name wrong on the back of the plate I made and we weren’t allowed to do penguins. I really wanted to do a penguin, with a bow tie. They were so cute.”
“In between those things, do you remember a tall pretty woman with long red hair coming for an interview to be your nanny?”
Movement in the hornbeams.
“Yes,” Millie says.
A squirrel trapezes to the bird feeder under the apple tree. “Yes?”
“Yes. She was really nice. She said she could do a cartwheel, but she was tricking. Daddy made her a coffee with the new Nespresso machine and he burned the milk.”
I sit down heavily on the bench. A dog in a distant garden barks.
I speak to Robin on autopilot. They are aiming to arrive at some time or another. They are expecting something. Robin has to be somewhere at some point.
If Ania came and Philip saw her, made her coffee, why did he keep quiet?
Robin is still speaking and I must have responded in the way that’s expected, because she has said good-b
ye and hung up.
I dial Jack. It doesn’t ring but goes straight to voicemail.
I put the phone down and groan out loud.
“What’s up?”
Philip is standing in the doorway in my dressing gown, his hair wetly slicked back from his face, his cheeks pinkly shaved. Damp prints darken the steps behind him. “You okay?”
I try and smile. He turns his back and starts opening cupboards, finding frying pans and cutlery. “I met Marta on the stairs,” he says over his shoulder. “I gave her thirty quid and sent her out for the day so we can have the house to ourselves. I’m going to make my wife breakfast.” He has his face in the fridge, arms out to each side, as if he is stretching out a leg muscle. “Not that there’s much here: eggs, manky cheese, one onion, carrots . . . An omelet à la Philippe.”
As he removes the items one by one, he makes a face at me, sort of “tra la la, aren’t I clever?” I manage to say, “Aren’t you clever?” I join him at the counter, and while he melts butter and sautés the onion and beats eggs, I take a frozen loaf of Hovis out of the freezer and chip away two slices to make toast. I find the Nespresso capsules and fill the back of the machine with water and scrub away the scorched deposits in the base of the milk frother. I’m trying hard to think, but my brain is racing, spinning, the wheels not touching the ground.
Over on the table, my phone rings and vibrates.
“Don’t answer it,” Philip says. “Ring them back later. Look.” He shows me his empty hands, the empty pocket of my dressing gown. “BlackBerry-free!”
“You’ve actually left it upstairs?”
“Well, not exactly. It’s in the hall, just about in earshot, but I’m not holding it, not clasping it to my bosom. Small steps, Gabs, small steps.”
It’s the old, self-mocking Philip.
“Okay.”
I sit and eat my eggs, conscious of the scraping of my fork on the china, trying to behave normally. I tell him about Millie and Robin, how they will be here in the next couple of hours. I watch his face. Did he pick up the phone upstairs and already know this? He covers it well if so. He looks delighted—his expression brightens and expands. I think of balloons filling with air, the paper sea horse Millie got for her birthday that grew to ten times its own size in water. “My little girl,” he says.
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