by Rebecca Reid
‘I don’t understand,’ he kept repeating. ‘I don’t know why she would do this.’
It had felt cruel to tell him that she had known about the affair, that she had told them both how she had found hairs on his clothes, followed him to the club and watched as he pressed some twenty-two-year-old up against a locker. But it had to be done. Now he knew it was his fault. She hoped he wouldn’t ever tell Inigo. That would be unnecessary. He certainly wouldn’t tell anyone else. He was too wracked with guilt for that. Instead he’d tell them that Lila couldn’t get over losing her baby, that she was drinking heavily. Depressed.
Inigo had been staying with her and Charlie. Roo’s parents were too old to take him, and there could be no question of Lila’s stepmother Clarissa helping out. Roo had made noises about wanting to keep Inigo with him, but he was drinking. Drinking a lot, actually. Georgia had pretended not to notice all the bottles lying around when she visited. But they were rudely present, declaring Roo’s mental state for anyone to see.
Georgia had snapped a picture, then neatly stacked the bottles in the recycling bin, and asked Charlie to have a word. Inigo, at least, didn’t seem to have noticed any change to his life. Perhaps Lila had been around less than any of them had known. He slept through the night, mostly, his chubby hands clasped around the Peter Rabbit which Georgia had given him as a baby. Charlie had seemed a bit uncomfortable to start with when the John Lewis van had drawn up and unloaded the furniture for Inigo’s new room. But, as Georgia had explained, he needed somewhere to sleep. It could all go on eBay after Inigo went home, but without Lila, Roo would need them to babysit more often. It made sense, for now, for him to have a bedroom with them. It was purely practical. A few nights ago, Georgia had come down the flight of stairs from their bedroom to the first floor and caught a glimpse of Charlie over the crib. He was stroking Inigo’s downy head and whispering something. Georgia had said nothing, she hadn’t wanted to interrupt. But the sight of them together, of Charlie fathering a tiny person, had filled her chest with a warmth she couldn’t remember experiencing before. ‘Let’s make a baby,’ she had whispered to him later that night, reaching under the covers for him.
Charlie had seemed surprised, as if there was some strangeness in wanting to do it so soon after Lila’s death. She had started to say that Inigo would need someone to play with, a sibling. But she had stopped herself.
‘Roo looks terrible,’ Nancy whispered to her. ‘He should have made an effort, for her father at least.’
Classic Nancy. Brutally, cruelly honest, even now.
She looked over the crowd of people in black, searching for Roo, checking to see that he was looking after Inigo properly. He seemed to be. Perhaps he had managed to make it this far through the day without drinking.
‘It was a lovely service,’ she said. ‘The vicar managed to make it uplifting, in spite of everything.’
Nancy snorted. Why couldn’t she play nice, just for today? A little respect, a few tears. But no, she had to do it her way, turning up as the ceremony started, wearing navy instead of black because it didn’t wash her out as much.
‘Bullshit. Nothing uplifting about it.’
Georgia cast her eyes around, trying to see if anyone in the slow procession towards the house had heard. It seemed not.
‘Why is everyone walking so slowly?’ complained Nancy again.
‘Because they’re sad,’ she hissed.
‘I didn’t realize sadness impeded your ability to walk,’ said Nancy, but at least she’d had the decency to lower her voice. ‘I have to leave for the airport at four.’
They’d be back in Boston tomorrow, their lives entirely untouched. They wouldn’t have to sit across the Sunday lunch table from Roo every weekend, watching him numbly push food around a plate and down his glass of wine three times faster than anyone else. Grief was boring, she was starting to realize. In film and on TV it was all screaming and shouting and deep conversations about the person who was dead. But not in real life. In real life it was slow and dull and it turned people who were once good company into zombies.
‘Is that her dad?’ Georgia asked Nancy. ‘I haven’t seen him for years.’
Not since university, in fact. They’d stayed at Lila’s father’s house after some party in South London. It had smelt like milk and been full of prams and soft toys. A time-warp. It wasn’t the house of someone who had a grown-up daughter. And now, he didn’t. His arm was linked with Clarissa’s. She wasn’t ageing well. She’d had something done to her face. It looked pillowy. It was a shame. She had been beautiful, once.
‘George?’ asked Nancy.
She looked up. ‘Yes?’
‘Are you OK?’
Georgia nodded. ‘Fine.’
‘No regrets?’
She paused for a moment. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘Good.’
Georgia watched their breath float away on the blue air. ‘Why do you ask?’
Nancy smiled, her teeth brilliant white. ‘Just checking.’
Acknowledgements
I wrote the later drafts of Perfect Liars when I was staying with my grandmother, who was dying. One of the real gifts of getting my first book deal was that it afforded me the flexibility to spend time with her over the last two months of her life.
During those final few weeks we had a lot of conversations, as you do when someone is dying. One of the things that she told me she hated (though not as much as she hated what the Daily Telegraph wrote about the Kardashians) was books with long acknowledgements.
I was inclined to agree with her until I sat down to write mine and realized quite how many people it takes to make a book happen.
Without Darcy Nicholson and the team at Transworld there might have been a book, but it wouldn’t have been this book. From the moment I met Darcy I knew she was my person and that I needed to work with her. The entire team at Transworld has been a gift.
Before Darcy there was the team at the Eve White Literary Agency, most importantly Eve herself. Eve discovered my writing in the Royal Holloway Creative Writing Anthology when I was twenty-three and the idea of writing a book still felt like a complete dream.
Similarly, I owe an enormous debt to my MA creative writing group, most especially Monica, Gail, Rebecka, Samantha, Sophie and Max.
Before I wrote books, I wrote articles, and it would be enormously remiss of me not to thank the people who taught me how to do that. Claire Cohen, Emma Barnett and Radhika Sanghani, then the team running the Telegraph’s Women’s section, took a chance on me when I’d never published so much as a blog post. I am grateful to them every day.
Similarly, the Lifestyle team at metro.co.uk – Miranda Larbi, Ellen Scott and Lisa Bowman – have been unfailingly flexible, kind and understanding when writing this book made me unreliable, annoying and a pain in the arse to work with.
Friends, also, were a huge part of getting this done. Chloe, Pete, Catherine and my beautiful goddaughter Ivy. Natalie, Hannah C, Emma, Jon, Catherine, Ian, Madeline, Jelly, Alicia – you are the most incredible cheerleaders.
The Coven: Liv, Emily, Grace, Mel, Kathy. You’re the best/worst friends a person could have. You were supporting me even when you didn’t know it. Mostly with wine.
The Mayfield girls – Flick, Becka, Aimee, Georgie, Carol, Lexi and all of the rest of the class of ’09 – always so unfailingly kind and supportive.
If I was a little scornful of people who wrote long acknowledgements, I was very judgemental of those who decided that their acknowledgements were a place to thank people they hadn’t seen for several decades. But again, I was wrong.
There are teachers who taught me that, despite being dyslexic and having terrible handwriting, I could probably achieve quite a lot if I stopped being so sodding lazy. So even if they never see this: Miss Upton, Miss Halliday, Mr Filkin, Mr Kilbride, Mrs Thompson, Miss Cornish and Mr Oxborough, I am so grateful.
A foray back into childhood brings me neatly to the part that I couldn’t ha
ve avoided even if I’d wanted to. My mad, wonderful, brilliant family – all the Reids, the Mears and the Sillars, but most especially Tim, Charlotte, Lucy and George.
No two parents have ever believed in their children as much as Tim and Charlotte believe in us. The emotional and logistical support that they’ve given me is truly astonishing. You could not find two more generous human beings. With parents like them, it’s no surprise that my divine siblings Lucy and George turned out so bloody great.
Lastly, I would like to thank my husband. When I was twenty-three I sat at our kitchen table and told him that I wanted to be a writer. He said that he would support me in any way that he could.
I don’t think he knew then that what would follow would be two years of stress about money, stress about writing, stress about agents and submissions and contracts and finally, finally, a book. Neither of us ever had any way of knowing that it would be OK. Sometimes I was quite convinced that it wouldn’t be. But he always seemed sure.
Thank you, Marcus. Thank you for being a broke twenty-something in your thirties for me. Thank you for all the holidays you skipped and things you went without so that I could make terrible money following my enormously impractical dream. I love you.
(Sorry, Granny. Miss you.)
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TRUTH HURTS
What’s more dangerous, a secret or a lie?
Available to pre-order now
Out August 2019
After
‘Ready, Mrs Spencer?’ he asked.
No, she thought. Not ready at all. She nodded. ‘Yes. Go ahead.’
It was a noise like nothing she had ever heard. A bang would be the easiest way to describe it, but it was more than that. Shattering. Cracking. Hundreds of years of history and memories collapsing as the wrecking ball swung into the house. Her home.
She watched the honey coloured walls fold in on themselves, watched as the ball smashed through room after room. The crowd behind her gasped with each swing.
It looked like a doll’s house now. You could see right in, the rooms rudely naked without the front of the house. It was almost comical, the huge porcelain bath of the blue bathroom exposed to the elements. And then, with another swing of the ball, that was gone too. Poppy tried not to wince, to look like this was what she wanted. She had to put on a show for the people who had come to watch.
This was entertainment for them. She’d dressed carefully that morning, choosing the beautifully cut trench coat and velvet-soft jeans as protection against them just as much as the autumn air.
They think I want this, Poppy told herself. They think this was my choice.
Clouds of beige dust filled the air, her home reduced to nothing.
Odd to think that once upon a time she had worried about stains on the sofa or marks on the carpet.
‘Are you all right?’ The man with the clipboard seemed confused by her. Maybe the purple stains under her eyes were too much of a contrast with the size of the diamond on her left hand. She nodded again. ‘Yes. Fine.’
‘Most people don’t like to watch demolitions,’ he said. His suit was cheap. Shiny. The kind of thing Drew would have despised.
‘No?’
‘Upsetting, I suppose. Seeing your home go.’
Poppy pulled her jacket around her. ‘It’s the right thing to do.’
Those were the official words. The words she had said to the local council, to people in the village who asked about it. To the local paper when they rang to discuss her generosity.
It was a gift to the community, she claimed. A lovely, grassy park full of climbing frames and swings, somewhere for local children to play together. A way of changing a tragic place into a place of enjoyment. Of hope. And no one seemed to question it. After all, how could Poppy really be expected to go on living there, after what happened?
Chapter I
‘Right, they’re now officially five hours late,’ Poppy said into the phone.
‘Have you called them?’ Gina’s voice, though hundreds of miles away, was comfortingly familiar. Poppy could see her, tangled up in her bed, curls tied up on the top of her head. For the hundredth time that week she wished she were here with Gina, instead of the Hendersons.
‘No, I hadn’t thought of that, I’ve just been trying to reach them with my mind,’ she sniped.
Gina didn’t answer.
‘Sorry,’ Poppy said. ‘I’m just pissed off.’
‘I can tell.’
‘It’s the third time this week.’
‘You need to say something to her when they get back.’
Poppy raised her eyebrows at the phone. Maybe Gina’s boss, who adored her, might take kindly to being told off by the nanny but Mrs Henderson made Cruella de Vil look like Julie Andrews.
‘Have you started playing that game where you work out how much they’re actually paying you per hour?’ asked Gina. ‘That’s when you know it’s bad.’
‘We’re down to £3.70,’ she said. Eighteen hours a day, six days a week, for four hundred quid. She’d done the calculation on her phone after the kids had gone to bed.
Gina hissed through her teeth. ‘That’s bad. My worst was the Paris trip with the Gardiners. Seven kids, fifty quid a day. And they made me keep the receipts so they could check I wasn’t buying my lunch with theirs. I actually lost money that week.’
Poppy used her finger to hook a piece of ice from her glass of water. It slipped, falling back in. She tried again, craving the splintering of the ice in her back molars. It slipped again. ‘Why are rich people so stingy?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know babe,’ said Gina, yawning. ‘I need to hit the hay.’
‘No-o,’ Poppy whined. ‘I’ve cleaned the kitchen twice. I’ve laid the table for breakfast. I need you to entertain me…’
‘Go to sleep.’
Gina was right, of course. The youngest Henderson, little Lola, would be awake in four hours, and if Poppy didn’t snatch a few hours’ sleep before then she’d find herself snappish and short-tempered all day, taking the children’s parents’ shitty behaviour out on them. Which wasn’t fair.
‘OK, OK. Abandon me.’
‘Call me tomorrow, tell me all about how you calmly explained to them that you need notice if you’re going to be babysitting later.’
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. Night.’
Gina made a loud kissing noise and then the line went dead.
She could go to bed. Of course she could. But if Mrs Henderson came back sober enough to realize that Poppy had slept on the job, she’d lose her temper. Her husband might earn a million quid a year in the city, but she wasn’t above docking Poppy’s pay over crimes like needing sleep. Poppy tipped her head back, looking up at the sky. The stars were incredible here. It was hard to believe that it was the same orange sky she looked out over every night from her tiny room in the Henderson’s London house.
She had hoped that the cool air out here by the pool would wake her up. It wasn’t working. She could feel her eyelids pulling downwards. She picked up her glass and walked barefoot, back in to the house, sliding the huge glass doors closed and locking them behind her. She padded upstairs, putting her head around Rafe’s bedroom door first. He slept, just as he always did, perfectly still and clutching a plastic gun. His round face and rosebud lips betraying none of the aggression that would fill the house once he woke up tomorrow morning.
Damson next, Poppy’s favourite. She had decided years ago that parents weren’t allowed to have favourites, but nannies definitely were. Damson slept like her brother, perfectly still. Her iPad was in the bed next to her, an audiobook of The Secret Garden still being read out. Poppy leant over to turn it off and gently stroked the little girl’s cheek. Damson hadn’t been allowed a single ice cream all holiday because her parents had decided that those cheeks were too round. Damson hadn’t questioned it, or made a fuss, but watching her
stoic little face while her siblings wolfed down gelato hurt Poppy’s heart.
Last, Lola, curled into a little ball in her huge white bedroom. Poppy had spent every day of the holiday so far worrying that Lola would touch something white with chocolatey hands. Thoughts of childproofing didn’t seem to have been high on the agenda when they had booked this place.
The blankey that Mrs Henderson insisted Lola adored was a puddle on the floor. Just yesterday, Mrs Henderson had posted on Instagram about how Little Lola had told the first-class air hostess that she could have a cuddle with blankey during turbulence. The story, like everything else that woman posted, couldn’t have been more of a fiction. As Poppy bent down to retrieve an old cup from the bedside table, a beam of white light pressed through the cream curtains of Lola’s bedroom. So, they had finally come home. She glanced at the watch on her left wrist. Twenty past two. They’d said they would be home at eight.
‘Oh Poppy,’ husked Mrs Henderson, looking up as Poppy came into the kitchen. ‘Could you undo this?’ she held her wrist out. On it was a delicate, sparkling bracelet with a fiddly clasp. Poppy looked behind her, scanning the stark white living space for Mr Henderson, wondering why he hadn’t been asked to help. Mrs Henderson seemed to see where she was looking.
‘Mr Henderson decided to stay on at the party. But I couldn’t bear to wake up away from the children, so I decided to come home.’ She gave Poppy a wide smile. Five years working for the Hendersons had taught Poppy to read between the lines. This was a warning shot.
‘You know, Mrs Henderson,’ said Poppy, as she unclasped the bracelet. ‘The kids were worried. You told them you’d be home by eight.’
Mrs Henderson raised her eyebrows. ‘I’m sorry?’
No you’re not, thought Poppy. And I’m damned if I’m going to make this easy for you. ‘The kids. You said that it was just a drinks party. That you’d be home by eight. Rafe and Damson didn’t want to go to bed because they were worried about you.’