‘Better not scratch it,’ he warns. ‘It’s probably rigged up on a hotline to the police station. They’ll have us done for vandalism before you know it.’
‘Oooh,’ I say, biting my lip and feigning trepidation. ‘Better get our gloves on.’
Francis touches the tabletop with a fingertip, widening his eyes before snatching it back in mock-alarm. We’re stringing out the joke, but it’s the first evening since we arrived that everything feels so natural. It isn’t easy, right now, to connect this man with the one I was faced with little more than a month ago, the one who surfaces every so often with savage, unpredictable frequency. The tell-tale swings between mania and lethargy, the sick, regressive pull towards what he still can’t quite consign to the past. But they’re getting fewer, or at least I think so, and although it feels wrong, part of me knows that they throw the good times into sharper relief, make them more exhilarating and precious.
We begin to play and, sure enough, within five minutes it’s evident I’m not going to win. I’m an averagely good player, but Francis has an annoying knack with this kind of game, despite claiming to have played it no more often than I have.
‘Hey,’ I object, seeing the glint in his eye as he slides an X on to a triple-scoring tile, ‘X U – that’s not even a word. It’s just two random letters.’
‘Oh, right!’ Francis draws back in pretend deference, squinting at the board. ‘I’m so sorry … although, actually, Caroline, you’re wrong, because I think you’ll find that the xu is a monetary unit in Vietnam.’
‘As any fool knows,’ I say sarcastically, shaking my head.
‘It’s a hundredth of a dong,’ Francis replies patiently, as if to a small child.
‘A what?’ I can’t help laughing, despite my growing frustration, as I lamely add an S to an existing word and wait for his next manoeuvre. ‘Oh, no, now that’s just ridiculous—’ He has slipped an I neatly in next to an O. ‘Io?! What the hell is that?’
‘A cry,’ Francis says smugly. ‘Often of triumph, which is something you’d better get used to hearing, because, if I’m not mistaken, I’m smashing this.’
‘You think you’re so clever,’ I mutter, shooting him a glance across the table, ‘don’t you …’
He holds my gaze for a few moments. The candlelight brings out the angles of his cheekbones and darkens the hollows under his green eyes. A little frisson of surprise runs through me, an awareness that this is my husband and that, slowly but surely over the past two years, he has been merging back into the man I used to lie next to and watch sleeping for hours, unable to look away.
‘Your move,’ he says, eventually.
I lean forward across the coffee table and kiss him, softly at first, feeling my breathing quicken as his hands reach out and pull my face towards him, his fingers running through my hair. The pressure of his lips on mine hardens, and I shift away from my seat and climb swiftly on to his lap, wrapping my arms around his neck and arching my back to let his hand slide warmly up underneath the fabric of my shirt. We have done these things thousands of times, randomly punctuating the past fifteen years and, like anything you’ve done thousands of times, we’re good at them. So good that it’s easy to do them without thinking. My mind is clear and blank, white noise fizzing in my head. He’s undoing the clasp of my bra, and I reach down and wrench the zip of his jeans and then my own, wanting it quickly and without ceremony, but suddenly he’s pulling away and staring somewhere over my shoulder, his face intent and alert.
‘Did you hear that?’ he asks.
‘What?’ I shake my head, confused. ‘I didn’t hear anything,’ I say. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
I start to kiss him again, but a second later I hear it, too – a little patter of knocks on the front door, tentative and quiet. I glance at the clock on the wall; it’s almost ten at night. ‘Fucking hell,’ I mutter. ‘What’s that about?’
Francis is getting to his feet, doing up his jeans and heading for the front door. ‘Hold that thought,’ he instructs, throwing me a brief glance through narrowed eyes as he leaves the room. ‘I’ll see who it is and get rid of them.’
I sigh and lean back against the armchair, my body humming with frustration, an itch irritated and unscratched. I glance across at myself in the mirror – my shirt half undone, my trousers rucked around my thighs. A thought flickers darkly across the back of my mind: your hands on me, pushing the fabric down. I suppress it instantly, but it’s enough to send the moment slipping through my fingers like mercury.
I hear the front door opening and Francis’s quizzical ‘hello?’, then a female voice, low and charmingly apologetic. I can’t catch the words, but I recognize the voice. Starting to my feet, I straighten and do up my clothes then hurry out into the hall. Sure enough, Amber is standing on the doorstep, dressed in a short black skirt and a military-style coat buttoned up to the neck, her long, fair hair falling smoothly over her shoulders. She’s smiling up at Francis, using the same kind of easy charm I felt radiating from her in the café. When I appear in the hallway, she glances across, and her smile brightens dazzlingly. She gives a little wave, half greeting, half apology.
‘Caroline,’ she says. ‘Good to see you. I hope you don’t mind me popping round. I was just sitting around at home with nothing to do, and I thought, Why not come say hello? I hope I’m not interrupting anything.’
‘No …’ I say automatically, seeing that Francis is standing to the side and gesticulating for her to come in.
‘Great,’ she says. ‘I realized after we’d said goodbye yesterday that I hadn’t really arranged to meet up again, and I thought it would be a real shame if you left and I hadn’t seen you. You’re still here for another few days, right?’
‘Yes,’ I agree. ‘Until the weekend.’ There would be nothing too odd about this conversation, I realize, if it were being conducted at three in the afternoon rather than ten at night. Amber is making her way efficiently through the hallway and pushing open the door to the lounge, scanning the room with a quick flash of her gaze.
‘Not too late, is it?’ she asks, as if she has read my mind.
‘No, no,’ I say, overcompensating with my eagerness. Behind Amber, Francis makes a ‘who is this madwoman?’ face, but I can’t help noticing the way he looks at her as she sinks down on to the sofa, her skirt riding up her long, slim legs. She’s dressed for an evening out at a bar, not a casual neighbourly visit. Sexual jealousy prickles over me. It’s been a long time since I felt the slightest hint of this about my husband and another woman, and, perversely, I find that I like it.
‘I’ll get you something to drink,’ Francis says, disappearing into the kitchen. I sit down next to Amber on the sofa, and as I do so I catch sight of us both in the mirror and feel another jolt of that odd self-recognition that came to me as I walked away from her the day before. In the flattering candlelight, the similarity between us seems accentuated. I can’t help wondering if she sees it, too.
She leans in slightly, her voice low and intimate. ‘Your husband seems nice,’ she says.
‘Oh. Yes – thanks,’ I say stupidly. There’s something disarming about her frankness. ‘He is.’ I’m not sure if what I’m saying is true. ‘Nice’ isn’t a word I have ever associated with Francis. Unpredictable, mercurial, confusing, charming, infuriating, unknown. All of these, the hierarchy shifting from day to day.
‘I miss male company,’ Amber admits, shooting me another glance from beneath her eyelashes. ‘My boyfriend works away from home a lot. Partly why I’m at such a loose end this week, you know.’
I nod, making a vague noise of sympathy. The news that she has a boyfriend surprises me, despite her obvious attractions. She strikes me as compellingly self-contained, able to keep others at arm’s length and study them. She’s watching me, her pupils dark and liquid in the soft light. I have the feeling she knows what I’m thinking, and it unsettles me.
‘Sorry we don’t have much in,’ Francis announces, sweeping back into the room wi
th a glass of wine, which he presents to Amber. ‘Cheers. Nice to meet you. Caroline told me about your chat in the café yesterday.’ His gaze hardens for a moment as he waits for Amber’s acknowledgement and, when it comes, his face relaxes instantly. He still hadn’t been sure, I realize with a jolt of sadness, that I was telling the truth about where I was the previous morning.
‘Yes. Sorry about that – it was a bit impromptu. You must think I’m stealing her away from you,’ Amber says. ‘And on your holiday, too.’
‘Not at all,’ says Francis smoothly, settling down opposite us.
Amber lifts her glass to her lips and swallows half its contents in an easy gulp, not seeming to notice she is doing so. ‘The thing is,’ she says, a confidential note creeping into her voice, ‘I’m just interested in people. A bit too interested, maybe. It’s got me into trouble sometimes.’ She glances across at me and smiles. ‘I never learn.’
Her face clouds but then she laughs, knocking back the rest of her wine and wiping her hand delicately across her mouth. Her red-painted fingernails sparkle in the lamplight.
Francis leaps on to the topic she has opened up, going off on a tangentially relevant monologue about social media and its impact on how open we all are with our lives, albeit at a safe distance. It’s a subject about which both he and Amber seem to have a lot to say, and I let them talk, the conversation washing over me. I’m thinking about the fact that she is sketching herself as an open book and yet whatever she says seems to have some kind of subtext shimmering beneath it that I can’t quite catch. I can’t read her, I realize, because I don’t really know her at all.
Slowly, I become aware that the interchange is winding down and that Francis is covertly looking at me, sending me a signal to intervene. ‘So,’ I say randomly, ‘is this house much like yours, Amber? They all look pretty similar from the outside.’ I cringe inwardly at my own inanity, but Amber seems surprisingly animated, taken by the question.
‘Actually,’ she says, getting to her feet and glancing out into the hallway, ‘it is pretty similar, in layout, anyway. Mine is a lot messier. But yes, the basic structure.’ She stops, as if pondering something. ‘I’m going to go to the bathroom, if that’s all right,’ she says abruptly. And before I can say another word, she has gone.
Francis and I sit in silence for a minute, listening to the sound of her footsteps retreating up the stairs, then the creak of floorboards above. The footsteps are sporadic and spaced out, as if she’s pacing the length of the first floor and back again.
‘She’s not going to the bathroom,’ I whisper. ‘Not straight there, anyway.’ I smile uncertainly, wanting this to be funny, but my limbs have automatically tensed, and I realize that I am holding my breath.
Francis is quiet, listening. For a few moments there is nothing then the creak of a door, softly pushed ajar and released. Before I know it, I’m starting to my feet, moving towards the foot of the stairs. I’ll go up there, see what she’s doing for myself. But somehow, when I reach the staircase and peer up – the smoothly polished wood, the darkness of the landing above – childish fear grips me and I can’t do it. There is something in the cool anonymity of this place that reminds me of the set of a horror film.
I hear the footsteps again, quicker and more decisive this time, heading for the top of the staircase, and I dive back into the lounge, where Francis is waiting. In another moment, Amber reappears in the doorway, smiling radiantly. Her handbag is back on her shoulder, her coat rebuttoned.
‘I’ll leave you two to it,’ she says. ‘Thanks so much. Caroline, we’ll see each other again, yes? Perhaps another coffee or something, before you go.’
‘Yes – of course,’ I say weakly. She has barely been in the house twenty minutes, and her departure is oddly abrupt, but it seems to have gained its own momentum and I find I’m following her obediently through the hallway and holding open the front door, waving her off into the night.
I close the front door and lean back against it, raising my eyebrows. Francis shrugs his shoulders and heads for the stairs. ‘People are strange,’ he says dismissively, but I can see he’s unsettled.
‘Some more than most.’ I think back over the past few minutes, and I can’t catch on to anything especially incriminating, just a gut feeling that Amber has not behaved as most people would have, that there’s something about her that feels off kilter.
I glance back at the table, still set with the Scrabble board. ‘We’re not going to finish the game?’ I call after Francis.
His voice drifts down to me from the landing. ‘Let’s give it a miss,’ he says. ‘Got better things to do …’
With an effort, I remember what we were doing before the doorbell rang. I fumble to recapture the desire I had felt. I can’t quite hold on to it, but I know from experience that it will come back if I let it, and I follow him up the stairs. By the time I get to the bedroom he’s already half undressed, lying on the bed and lazily undoing the buckle of his jeans. ‘Coming?’ he says.
I nod and start to pull off my own clothes, standing in front of the bed and looking around the room. I have the odd sensation of something being somehow out of place or disturbed. I look carefully in all directions, trying to pinpoint the source of the feeling, but nothing concrete emerges, just a vague sense of difference and unease.
In the same way you can search your mind for a long-forgotten name for hours and then wake up with it instantly clear and present, I notice what it is that is different about the bedroom the instant I open my eyes the next morning. The little dark purple umbrella that hung over a hook in the bedroom wall next to the mirror has disappeared. I glance around the room, in case I have moved it for some reason without remembering, but it isn’t there. I think about the footsteps above our heads as we sat downstairs the evening before, and I try to imagine Amber coming in here, swiftly scanning the room for anything of interest. Despite the austere minimalism of the room, I can see several items of clearly higher value at a glance. It makes no sense that she would have taken the umbrella.
‘So maybe she’s some sort of klepto,’ Francis shouts over the noise of the shower when I go into the bathroom to tell him. He shrugs, energetically shampooing his hair. ‘There doesn’t have to be a reason, does there?’
‘I suppose not.’ For a therapist, Francis is often surprisingly dismissive of human behaviour. ‘Bit bizarre, though,’ I add, but he has already turned around, tipping his head up to the shower and lost to the roar of the water.
I stand there for a few more moments, then quietly leave the room and go downstairs to the kitchen. Once again, I’m struck by its unnatural perfection: the spotless surfaces, the regimented rows of crockery and kitchenware. A shaft of sunlight is slanting through the window, hitting the surface of the worktop like a carefully placed spotlight. The only thing out of place is me.
I try to recapture the easy relaxation I felt the previous evening, before Amber’s visit, but it’s gone. My whole body feels tight and strained, as if I am waiting for a blow. I fill the kettle with water, flick the switch and stare at it. I can barely see what is right in front of my eyes.
My head is unexpectedly flooded with pictures, memories. They are flicking through me so fast it makes me dizzy. I open the cupboard and take out the jar of instant coffee and a mug. I go to the fridge and get the milk. I pour the boiling water out, the thin stream of sound hissing into the silent air.
My body is going through the motions, but I’m not here. I’m walking down a dark street towards your car and the air is warm and scented and your hand is in mine and I’m looking up at your smiling face and saying, ‘I want to remember this, I want this to be a night we don’t forget.’
‘No,’ I say aloud.
The sound of my voice jolts me back and I say it again, louder. My heart is racing and the palms of my hands are slippery. A shudder passes down the length of my spine, bristling my skin. I close my eyes and count. I have not had to do this for months – had thought I would not have to
do it again. The effort of blocking these thoughts out is immense.
At last I open my eyes again, and fear rips through me, sudden and fierce. It’s coming here that has done this. The flowers, the music, the photograph in the hall … all these little sparks of memory fusing and starting a fire I now have to smother. It doesn’t feel like coincidence, no matter what I have told myself. I stare around at this stranger’s kitchen, and I find myself breaking away, walking fast through the rooms, trying to find some chink in their anonymity. It’s a show home, a shell. I’m opening cupboards, rifling through the limited possessions. They tell me nothing.
I begin looking deeper, excavating. Running my hands underneath the sideboards and sofas, checking behind curtains. I’m in the bedroom, kneeling by the side of the bed, when my hand closes around something hard and smooth, pushed against the wall behind the headboard. I pull it out and stare at the small glass bottle in my hand. It’s aftershave, and as soon as I see the slashed black logo on the front I recognize it. I bring it to my nose and the smell of it hits me, sends an instant rush of nostalgia right to my heart.
My mouth is dry and crazy thoughts are whirling inside me, and I have to do something, something to get them to stop. I’m thinking about the meaningless little messages I exchanged on the house-swap site. I can’t even remember what we said. They were functional, formal. Trading details.
S. Kennedy. It’s just a name. It might not even be real.
Abruptly, I snatch up my mobile phone and tap the web address for the house-swap site into the task bar. I know my log-in details, can read those messages again. But the site won’t come up, my phone freezing, refusing to reload.
Fighting for breath, I try to think. I open the available wireless connections and find a new BT entry in the list, but it’s locked. Suddenly, the note that was waiting for me on the pillow pops into my head. Information in kitchen folder. I run downstairs again and immediately see a navy wallet file leaning against the microwave. I haven’t bothered to open it before, but maybe the wifi details will be here. I cross the room quickly and snatch it up. I flick to the contents page and scan it. Wireless Information, p.4. The paper creases and scrunches under my fingers, and my hands are shaking as I smooth out the page I want, and then I’m staring at the little printed words and something has exploded in my head and everything is clear and quiet and still.
The House Swap Page 7