The thought of Matt was like a raw wound; maybe it would start to heal if she could manage not to touch it. But she knew that was impossible. He was married to her sister. Her entire worldly possessions were in his house. She was going to be scrambling around rental agencies today in a panic, just to avoid him. How could she not think of him? How could she not worry about him, with an injury that looked as if it had messed up his chances of ever playing rugby again?
He belongs to another woman, she told herself severely, as she jumped off the bus carrying her from Victoria, halfway up Park Lane. Deeley had taken the Gatwick Express back to London; no more taxis for her. After the extravagance of Jersey, she was on a new push for economy. She went quickly down the stairs that led to the underpass. Matt’s not yours to worry about. All you can do is leave him the hell alone.
She emerged full of good resolutions on the other side of Park Lane, next to the car showroom. Green Street was just a few turnings up on the right, and after all her walks on the beach in Jersey, her feet sinking deep in the wet sand, she was practically flying along the pavement, even with her heavy overnight bag slung over her shoulder. In and out, as quick as possible. Grab a change of clothes, some clean underwear, do the rounds of rental agents . . . She’d made a list in Jersey, had the printout ready in her pocket. Hopefully I’ll find something I can afford today, move right in . . .
She tumbled down the iron stairs to the basement flat without even looking up at the windows of the main house, her key in her hand.
And then she stopped as if she had run into a wall.
Because, sprayed on the front door, were the words: KEEP YOR FUCKING MOUTH SHUT.
Deeley stared at the graffiti in utter shock. It hadn’t been here when she left for Jersey. Even in her rush, she couldn’t have failed to notice these bright red letters splayed across the door. So it had been done while she was away.
Instantly, her thoughts flashed to the shove in front of the bus at King’s Cross, reconstructing the timeline. She’d come back to London, been attacked, fled Green Street for Jersey as if the hounds of hell were after her, and been away for four days. During which, perhaps, someone had come round to try to finish what they’d started at King’s Cross. And, failing to find her, they’d sprayed a crude but effective warning to her instead.
A warning that only she would see. The door had originally been the tradesman’s entrance; it was set back into the stone stairs that led up to the front door of the house. The below-ground area was fenced off from the street by black-painted iron railings; someone would have to lean over them and twist their body back on itself to squint down and see the door below, hidden by the overhang of the stairs. Whoever had done this had known that they wouldn’t be observed, and that only the inhabitant of the flat would see what they were writing.
It’s that woman, Deeley thought immediately. That scary woman from back home. She told me to stay away. She didn’t actually say to keep my mouth shut, not that I remember. But it has to be her.
Deeley pushed at the front door; it didn’t yield, which hopefully meant that no one had broken in. Past experience from her youth made her examine the lock for splintering, or footmarks where someone had tried to kick the door in, but it looked as pristine as before. She thumbed 999 on her phone and kept her thumb on the green phone button that would place the call, before she inserted the key into the door. Nerves racing, on the balls of her feet in case she needed to turn and sprint away, she pushed the door open.
She knew instantly that she was safe, that the flat was empty, though she couldn’t have said how. There was an absence to the atmosphere that was immediately reassuring, and a second later, she realized why: the woman from Riseholme had stunk of cigarettes. Cigarettes and cheap perfume, the rip-off stuff you got from pound shops or market stalls. Vividly, Deeley remembered Devon being mad about her fake Calvin Klein Eternity, which smelled like the real thing when you sprayed it on but turned to what Maxie had cruelly compared to cat’s pee after ten minutes or so.
If that woman had been in here, the flat would smell of her. No question. But all that hung on the air was the faint, sweet aftermath of the candle Deeley had burned the night before she left, Votivo Redcurrant.
She needed to move quickly, though. Dumping handfuls of dirty laundry onto the tiled floor of the kitchen, next to the washing machine, she dashed into the bedroom to grab more t-shirts, jeans, sweaters, underwear and socks. In the bathroom, she emptied the contents of the shelves into her matching gold quilted Elizabeth Arden toiletry bags; on her way out, she snatched a pair of boots and two pairs of ballerina flats.
Time’s up, Deeley. Get out of here now. She was no stranger to sudden moves – a dash-and-grab of her possessions before the bailiffs evicted them, or the people they were staying with couldn’t bear their mother’s drinking and drugging any more, or their mother had to up sticks before someone to whom she owed money tracked her down. Taking off at a moment’s notice had characterized much of her childhood. And at least now she didn’t have the torture of being terrified she would leave Brown Bear, her precious stuffed toy, behind; she remembered the scenes, the tears and hysteria, when she was told by their mother they were packing up again, had only ten minutes to collect her things, and Brown Bear was temporarily missing.
She’d always found him in the end, with the help of her sisters. And it was the memory of Maxie locating him down the back of the sofa, or in a tangle of cheap duvet, and shoving him at a sobbing Deeley, that gave her the impetus, as she ran out of the flat, locking the door behind her and dashing up the area steps to the comparative safety of the street, to cancel the 999 she’d tapped into her phone and ring her oldest sister instead.
Maxie
It was two in the afternoon, and Maxie should have been at work. To be precise, she should have been ensconced at her glass desk in her beautiful office, designs spread across it for the latest range of Bilberry wallets, key fobs and luggage tags, scribbling comments across each drawing, editing the spring/summer line of accessories till each one was a coveted collectable. It was the part of her job she loved the most: honing, pruning, pushing her designers to polish the Bilberry range till it shone.
So it was not only quite unprecedented, but contrary to her entire perfectly run life, that when her mobile rang she was actually in her living room, holding a sobbing child and dabbing inexpertly at its face to try to dry the tears. That was the least of the leakage problems the child was having, if the smell rising from its lower regions was anything to go by. Maxie had put calls into every agency she and her PA had been able to contact and now, hearing the trill of her mobile, she grabbed for it, hoping that it was the good news she’d been waiting for. That a substitute nanny had been found for her adoptive daughter.
Instead, it was her younger sister. Maxie’s heart sank. It was never good news to hear from Deeley. She’s barely more use than Alice, Maxie thought savagely, looking down briefly at the tear-splotched face of the child in her arms. Less, actually. At least Alice is excellent for PR.
‘Maxie! Oh, thank goodness you’re there!’ Deeley sobbed down the phone.
‘Not a good time,’ Maxie snapped between clenched teeth. ‘I’m in the middle of an emergency.’
She refused to say ‘childcare emergency’; she’d scorned so many women in business over the years for using that very phrase. And now here she was, bang in the middle of one, dammit. Why on earth had she thought it was a good idea to buy a baby?
‘Oh no! Is everything all right?’ Deeley said. ‘I am too, sort of – well, definitely—’
No, no, no, Deeley. I’ve looked after you enough. I absolutely do not have time for your emergency as well as my own.
‘Really can’t talk, Deeley,’ Maxie said sharply. ‘I’m not even in the office. I’ve had to come home. The nanny’s walked out.’
‘Oh no! That nice Australian you mentioned? I thought she was working out really well!’ Deeley said.
She was, Maxie reflected, u
ntil she decided to launch into a speech over breakfast about how little Alice was having difficulty bonding with her new mummy and daddy because she barely saw them. Olly had laughed, finishing up his kipper, and said that was precisely the point of having a nanny and it hadn’t done him any harm. Maxie, seeing the nanny’s eyes well up, had said swiftly that Mummy and Daddy were awfully busy with work at the moment, but that they’d have a nice holiday all together in Cornwall that summer. (It looked better for the voters if MPs holidayed in the UK.) The nanny had asked if Mummy and Daddy could try to get home before little Alice’s bedtime, and Olly, pushing back his chair and throwing his napkin on the table, had stood up, saying impatiently that they’d spent a fortune bringing the child over from Africa in the first place and that Whatsherface was very well paid to take care of her, so what the hell was all the fuss about? If this kind of thing kept up, he’d ban the child from coming in at breakfast time as well.
The nanny, deeply offended, had whisked Alice out of the dining room. Maxie, whose car was waiting outside, had called up to her to say that they’d have a chat that evening; but a few hours later, the sobbing Australian had rung Maxie’s mobile to say that her conscience wouldn’t allow her to bring up a child that never even saw the people who were supposed to be its parents, and that Maxie needed to be at home in the next half hour, as her bags were packed and she was standing by the door. Maxie had rushed home, reminded the ex-nanny tersely that she had signed a cast-iron confidentiality agreement and that Maxie would not only sue her for everything she had but would make sure her work visa was revoked if she breathed a word about the Stangrooms’ domestic arrangements, and, very reluctantly, had taken her sobbing child from the girl’s arms.
‘Yes, well – things didn’t quite go as smoothly as I’d hoped,’ Maxie informed her sister. Politicians and their spouses quickly became very skilled in the art of understatement. ‘I have to go, Deeley. We’ve got calls in to every agency in town – I need someone to take this child off my hands, pronto . . .’
Lucia, their very competent Romanian cleaner/housekeeper/cook, was out that afternoon doing errands, and though, technically, Maxie could have summoned her back and left Alice with her, it would only have been a very temporary solution. Lucia had a full-time job of her own, and Maxie had no desire to see Lucia cosily playing with Alice instead of carrying out the ironing and flower-arranging that was on her schedule for today.
‘I’ll come over!’ Deeley said, jumping at the idea. ‘I’ll come over right now and look after her! If I jump in a cab, I can be there in fifteen minutes. Tell you what, I’ll bring an overnight bag and camp out in the nanny’s room. I can stay for a few nights – that’ll give you time to interview a replacement and make sure you have the right one. Otherwise,’ she continued, ‘you’ll just take on the first one who shows up and maybe have this problem all over again. If I look after Alice till you find someone you really like—’
Maxie had never wasted time in her life.
‘Enough!’ she said, holding up one hand, making Alice scream even louder and cling to her, afraid of falling. ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Maxie muttered, putting the child down on the carpet. ‘Deeley, fine. Great. Come over here right away.’
She disliked being indebted to her sister, but what could she do? It was an emergency, and Deeley was quite right; this would solve the problem. Besides, Deeley did owe her for persuading Devon to take her in . . .
‘Oh, not at all!’ Deeley sang out, sounding surprisingly ecstatic for someone who had just committed herself to days of changing nappies and calming down a screaming child. ‘I mean, we help each other out, don’t we? That’s what sisters are for!’
Oh, fabulous, Maxie thought caustically. I knew there must be something.
But when Deeley arrived, Maxie experienced a sensation so new to her that it took her some time to identify it. Gratitude, she realized finally, with considerable surprise. It’s gratitude.
Deeley had chucked her overnight bag in the hall and gone immediately into the living room, where Alice was lying on the carpet, sobbing at a volume that, if it went any higher, only bats and dogs would hear. She had been trying to teach herself to stand by hauling on the legs of every single precious antique side table one by one, making the carefully arranged objects on their surfaces wobble dangerously. Maxie, who had been on her phone with her PA, had limited her childcare to barking a series of ever louder ‘No’s at Alice, which the latter had ignored completely; eventually, Maxie had used the tone of voice in which her mother-in-law ticked off naughty dogs, a steel lance of reproach which had made Alice collapse to the floor in hysterics, grabbing at a sofa tassel which promptly came off in her chubby little hand.
It had all been utterly horrendous. Maxie would have carried Alice back up to the nursery, which was completely free of Sheraton occasional tables bearing cut-glass vases, but she simply couldn’t bear to pick the child up any more. She was really beginning to smell now.
‘Oh, poor baby! Look at you!’ Deeley said, running over to her sobbing niece. ‘Poor little mite!’ She picked Alice up and the baby immediately stopped crying, looking up at her aunt with huge dark wondering eyes. ‘She probably needs a change, doesn’t she, Maxie? Why don’t you tell me where the nursery is, and I’ll take her up there and you can get back to work? Eew!’ She planted a smacking kiss on Alice’s forehead, making her niece giggle with pleasure. ‘Aren’t you the pongy one? Never mind, darling, we’ll get you all cleaned up in two secs.’
Maxie looked at her sister with something resembling awe.
‘I never thought I’d say this, Deeley,’ she said, ‘but you’re a lifesaver.’
‘Just show me where Alice’s stuff is and then leave it all to me,’ Deeley said cheerfully, settling Alice on her hip as her niece pulled inquisitively at her aunt’s hair. ‘Maybe we’ll go out for a walk later. It’s a lovely day.’
‘Thank you, Deels,’ Maxie said with complete sincerity; it was the first time she’d ever really been grateful to her younger sister. ‘If you’re sure you’ll be all right . . .’
But she was already dropping her phone and keys in her bag and looking round for her coat. The sooner she could put this horrendous, never-to-be-repeated experience behind her, the better.
Devon
You could spend a really long time getting ready for what promised to be the best date of your life, if you had absolutely nothing else to do. And Devon’s calendar that day was completely empty. She had sat down in front of her laptop a couple of times and tried to compose an email to Matt, but she was no writer; her books had been constructed by the expedient of having a writer follow her around, listening to her enough so that she could capture her voice on paper. Devon had had very little to do with them, really.
And if she couldn’t manage a cookbook, something as hard as an email to your husband telling him that you probably, on balance, thought you wanted a divorce, because you just didn’t think it could work out between the two of you, was completely out of her range. She got as far as ‘Dear Matt. I have something to say which I don’t think will be a massive surprise to you,’ which was the best opening she had managed to come up with; but following those words seemed impossible.
Particularly because Matt seemed to her a thousand miles away, a tiny speck on a very distant horizon, not even visible with the naked eye. When had she fallen out of love with him? When had she begun to realize that, lovely though he was, he simply wasn’t right for her – nor she for him? Probably longer than I know, she thought guiltily. I suppose I was as much in love with the idea of us as a perfect media couple as I was with Matt himself. Me and him in magazines, looking gorgeous, in our lovely house.
She hadn’t been a total hypocrite: she’d married Matt because she thought she loved him, and she’d definitely fancied him madly. But she knew, in this brutally truthful spate of self-analysis, that he had never really satisfied her emotionally, never made her feel as easy and relaxed to her core as Cesare had managed in
a mere twenty-four hours, without even trying. Matt was always worrying about her, wanting her to be happy. Sensing, probably because he was an intelligent, sensitive man, that she wasn’t as fully happy as she could be.
While Cesare was the opposite of her husband. All too clearly, Cesare just assumed that being with him, doing what he decided, would make Devon happy. And if it doesn’t, Devon thought acutely, he’ll assume that we’ll have a blazing row and I’ll shout at him a lot, and he’ll shout back, and we’ll wave our hands around madly while we yell insults. Which he’ll enjoy tremendously.
And, she had to add in the interests of honesty, so will I. Devon had always hated that Matt didn’t want to argue with her; he got really upset instead, which completely ruined any attempt to shout insults and wave one’s hands around. With Cesare, she realized, I feel that I can be myself. And with Matt, I was always pretending. Trying to be the person he wanted me to be. Maybe the person I wanted myself to be.
Well, it’s time to face up to who I really am. I’m a bit of a cow. I’m selfish and self-obsessed and vain and if you put me with a nice man, I’ll ride roughshod over him and make our lives a misery. Matt will be much better off without me. He needs a nice sweet girl who wants to have babies straight away, someone he can lavish care and attention on. While I need a man who isn’t half as nice as Matt, so I don’t have to pretend to be sweet when really I’m a bit of a bitch. I need someone as selfish and self-obsessed and vain as I am.
Which, of course, brought her straight back to Cesare. His hands, his mouth, his body against her. His nose. His hair. Her face creased into a stupid grin whenever she thought about him, and since she thought about him almost all day, she walked around grinning like a mad clown.
She had barely eaten; she had no appetite at all. Her clothes seemed looser. She had the feeling that the adrenalin surging through her was burning off some pounds; all she could manage to get down were a few small balls of mozzarella, light and melting on the tongue, floating in milky water that reminded her of the thermal springs yesterday. She had gone for a walk that morning, careful of the sun on her pale skin, and then for a swim in the pool; she needed to keep moving, because if her body wasn’t occupied it started craving Cesare so badly that she became frighteningly restless. She’d tried a glass of red wine at lunchtime to calm her down, but it tasted like acid and after that first sip, she’d thrown the rest of it down the sink.
Bad Sisters Page 31