by Lisa Jewell
Instead she pulled on a loose gray lambswool sweater and a pair of tight jeans. She dressed it up with diamond earrings, high-heeled boots and her hair up in a bun. She stared at herself hard for a moment, trying to picture herself objectively. What was she? Who was she? What would she be doing right now if she hadn’t taken that temporary assignment from the agency back in 2008 and fallen in love with the boss? Was this where she was meant to be? Here, right now, standing in a tiny bedroom in a tiny flat in Archway, dressing herself for a rather dull drinks party at her husband’s ex-wife’s house in Hove? A party at which she was likely to see her husband’s son for the first time since he’d kissed her on the mouth in a pub. Was this the correct turn of events? Or had something gone wrong along the way? She fixed her with a grim smile, this stranger in the mirror, and then she turned and left the room.
She and Adrian took the train down to Hove. London was quiet and slow. The tubes were half-empty and they had the train from Victoria to Brighton virtually to themselves. There was a stale flatness in the atmosphere, as though all the interesting people had stayed at home. They hadn’t been out the night before; Adrian had cooked a lobster and they’d drunk a bottle of champagne, watched Jools Holland and the fireworks on the TV and then gone to bed at one a.m. and had barely conscious sex. Exactly the same as the year before.
Maya glanced across at Adrian. He was reading a broadsheet, one long leg crossed high up upon the other. He had some stubble around his face, salt-and-peppered, and heavy bags beneath his eyes. She conjured up a wave of affection for him. Sweet Adrian. Who could ever resist Adrian?
They took a taxi from the station to Susie’s cottage. The sky above Hove was brilliant January blue and the shingled beach was full of people walking off the night before. Maya held herself straight at the front door as they waited for someone to open it. She patted her bun and forced her mouth into a smile.
“Hello!” It was Cat. She was clutching a glass of pink wine and the hand of a boy with tattooed arms. The boy with tattooed arms let go of her hand and headed towards the kitchen and Cat leaned in to hug Adrian and Maya, far too hard. “Hello, lovely, lovely people,” she said, squeezing them again before releasing them. “Come in! Quick. It’s freezing out there.” Cat was wearing a black T-shirt with a sequined skull on the front and a tiny tartan kilt that barely covered her upper thighs. Her dyed hair was in a backcombed bun almost the same size as her head.
“Who was that?” said Maya, eyeing the kitchen and shutting the door behind her.
“That was Duke!” she said. “He’s my boyfriend. Well, at least I think he’s my boyfriend. He hasn’t actually said he is but I figure if he said yes to this party—and I didn’t put any pressure on him at all, I swear—then he must feel like he’s my boyfriend. I mean, why would you come otherwise?” She gestured behind her at the vignette beyond the living-room door: Susie’s ancient parents sitting side by side on Susie’s sofa clutching paper plates of sandwiches and looking thoroughly confused.
They followed Cat into the kitchen, where they found Cat’s boyfriend, Duke, making himself a vodka and tonic; Cat’s best friend, Bonny, and Luke’s girlfriend, Charlotte. Cat introduced Adrian and Maya to Duke, and Maya greeted Bonny and Charlotte with kisses on their cheeks. Maya suddenly felt powerfully that she did not want to be here. She let Cat pour her a large glass of wine and she started drinking it urgently. If Charlotte was here, then Luke must be, too.
The young people (Maya had no idea if at thirty-two she was still young. Being in your thirties was very confusing in that respect) were all hollering and laughing and pressing buttons on phones. Cat, Bonny and Charlotte took a photograph of themselves on Cat’s smartphone, all pouting upwards into the lens. When had pouting replaced smiling, Maya wondered, as the natural response to having a camera pointed in your face? Susie burst in then, wearing a shapeless floral dress, tatty leggings and UGG boots, her pale hair held back from her weathered face with kirby pins. She looked a little like a day-release patient.
“I thought I heard your voices!” she announced, wreathing them in hugs and kisses. “Thank you both so much for coming! You’ve got drinks? Good! And there’s food in the sitting room. Tons of it. Nobody seems to be eating for some reason, not sure why, people are usually starving on New Year’s Day. I hope you two are, otherwise that’s fifty quid’s worth of M and S in the mulcher. Have you met Duke?” She pulled Cat’s boyfriend towards them by the hand and squeezed his shoulder.
Adrian and Maya said that they had and Susie said, “Isn’t he just gorgeous? Look at all these lovely tattoos! I do love a man with tattoos.”
Susie led them into the sitting room. There was Luke, sitting on the piano stool talking politely to a large, waistcoated man whom she did not recognize. Luke didn’t notice Maya walk in at first. But when he did, he did a full double take and then pulled an expression halfway between a smile and a grimace. Maya returned the smile and mouthed hello. She watched as Luke tried to refocus his attention on the man, tried to find the thread back into the conversation. But his body language had changed and he looked trapped, self-conscious, a red flush inching up his pale neck.
Maya turned away and focused instead on the buffet table at the far end of the room. She wasn’t hungry. She and Adrian had had baguettes from the station. But she needed something to do. She piled a Cath Kidston paper plate with things she had no appetite for and turned back to the room. Luke had gone and Adrian called to her to join him in a conversation with “an old friend.” The old friend was a too-thin man in his fifties wearing a Clash T-shirt and battered black Converse. There was something slightly unnerving about the aspic-set look of him, like a kind of punk Miss Havisham. Maya did not want to talk to him. She knew already that she would have nothing in common with him and nothing to say to him and that he would inevitably at some point bore her to tears with some hilarious anecdote about the things that he and Adrian had got up to when they were young. They all did that, Adrian’s friends. They dug deep for their best selves to impress the young girl. They were never quite natural and always too eager either to grimly overplay their ancientness or to ensure that she was made aware of the fact that they too had once been young.
She thought of the young ones in the kitchen, with their tattoos and their piercings and their smartphones and their pouting, and for a moment she stood there in the center of the room, clutching her paper plate, swaying gently in the terrible, squalling realization that she did not belong here. She had been so desperate to be a part of this, had watched the machinations of this life from a distance all those months, marveling at the magical glow of it all: the Islington town house, the trophy wives and darling children, the weekends away en masse, the ramshackle parties, the legends, the traditions, the glittering story of them all and their sprawling mass of friends and people. She’d seen it, she’d smelled it and she’d wanted it. And now it was hers. And, like a shiny thing seen and coveted through the plate-glass windows of a fancy shop, now that she had it in her hands it had lost its allure.
She drew in her breath and smiled at Adrian. She gestured that she was heading back to the kitchen and saw the old friend’s face drop slightly with disappointment. She took her plate and left the room. She hovered at the cusp of the kitchen, but couldn’t quite bring herself to walk in. She could hear the screech and overwrought hilarity of the youngsters and she suspected Luke was in there too. She opened up the door to Susie’s snug, a tiny room off the hallway where Susie had a desk and a sofa and a huge collection of vinyl records housed in reclaimed cubbies. She sat on Susie’s chair and rested the unwanted plate of food on the desk. The walls in here were covered in photographs, a mosaic of vintage mismatched frames, barely a gap between them. And there it was, yet again, a physical reminder that she was an interloper in this world. The decades of life that had been lived before she’d arrived, the children born and raised and grown, the holidays and birthdays and Christmas mornings without her. And th
e only thing that could possibly bring her truly into this world was a baby of her own. And the baby would not come. It refused to come. It was almost as if the baby knew that it was only wanted as a golden ticket. Because Maya didn’t really want a baby. She wasn’t broody. There was no clock ticking. Just a desperate urge to belong to this club of which she felt like an off-peak member.
The e-mailer was right. She was nothing. She was a shadow in the wings.
She ran her finger along the frame of a photograph of all four of them: Susie, Adrian, Luke and Cat. Susie was California pretty in faded jeans and a checked shirt, her pale hair long and plaited, a crescent of creamy cleavage showing at the V of her shirt. Adrian was full-cheeked and handsome, his arms draped around Cat’s neck from behind. The children were chunky and small, around four and six, Maya estimated, much more similar to each other than they looked now that they were adults. Behind them was a range of golden sand dunes and a puffy blue and white sky. Where was this taken? Maya didn’t know. She would have been a teenager when this photo was taken. She would have walked past this young family at the beach and thought nothing of them.
She jumped slightly as she heard the door hinge creak slowly.
“Hi.” It was Luke.
“Hi.” She felt her face fill with color.
He joined her alongside the photograph. “Norfolk,” he said.
She nodded. “I’ve never been.”
“We used to go every summer. My uncle had a cottage there.”
“I didn’t know you had an uncle.”
“Yeah, Mum’s brother, Pete. He killed himself. A couple of years after that photo was taken.”
“Oh God.” She grimaced. “How awful.” How did she not know about Uncle Pete? Who else did she not know about?
“Yeah. And then Dad left. A year later.”
Maya glanced at him. He was like a walking wound sometimes.
“Was it hard for your mum?” she asked. “When he left?” Adrian had always talked fondly of the transition from wife one to wife two. Almost as if it had been a wonderful piece of serendipity that had led him from Susie to Caroline, from Hove to London.
Luke looked at her as though she was dim. “Of course it was,” he said. “I mean, look at us.” He directed his gaze back to the photograph. “Look how happy we were. Three years later he’d gone. I was nine.”
“But your mum, she was OK about it?”
“Well, yeah, kind of. But that’s only because she was off her tits all the time.”
“Susie?”
“Yeah. She knew what was happening. She knew about Caroline long before my dad told her. She was always leaving us with our grandparents and going clubbing, raving. I think she thought it was better than staying at home and waiting for Dad to get back. I think she was just getting ready, you know, for the big revelation, so she could make out that she didn’t care either way. But she did. She didn’t used to be like this, you know”—he gestured towards the living room—“scatty and scruffy. She used to be quite cool.” He looked back at the photo and sighed. “Anyway. How are you?”
“I’m fine,” she said. “You?”
“Yeah. I’m OK. I’m sorry I haven’t been writing or calling or anything. It’s been a bit . . .”
“That’s OK,” she replied hastily. “I understand.”
“I really need to apologize,” he said, turning to face her. “For what happened. It was . . . it was totally out of order.”
“It’s fine,” she said, glancing anxiously through the crack in the door, listening for footsteps. “Really, Luke. I was flattered.”
He issued a dry bark. “I wasn’t trying to flatter you, Maya. I was . . . oh God. I shouldn’t have said anything. Look. Let’s just . . .”
“Yes,” said Maya. “Yes. Forget it happened.”
“Yes,” Luke agreed. “Yes. Thank you.” He sounded relieved.
Maya smiled sadly. She did not feel relieved. She felt sad and anxious. She felt as though she was smothering something tiny and precious, something that had barely drawn its first breath. She clutched his hand, squeezed it hard, and then dropped it at the sound of the door hinge creaking again.
“There you are!” It was Charlotte. She glanced from Maya to Luke and back again. “What are you two doing in here?”
“I was just showing Maya some old family photos,” said Luke, pulling Charlotte towards him by the waist and kissing her on the cheek.
Maya tried not to look, tried not to feel anything. She forced a smile and said brightly, “Look! Look at the cuties!”
Charlotte followed her pointing finger to a photo of Luke and Cat sitting one on each end of a seesaw, both in brightly colored anoraks and woolen hats. Her face scrunched up and she said, “Oh. Adorable! Look at how adorable you were!” She kissed Luke on the cheek and rested her head against his chest.
Maya picked up her plate of uneaten food and turned to leave the room. The last thing she saw as she did so was Luke’s blue eyes fixed upon her over the top of Charlotte’s head, meaningfully and desperately.
29
July 2012
Adrian didn’t listen to the voice mail from the unknown number until he got home from work on Monday. The voice mail icon had been flashing at him since nine o’clock that morning but he simply hadn’t had a free moment. He was shutting the office early during the Olympics, so that his employees wouldn’t have horrible nightmares getting home on London transport and miss dates and bedtimes and hot suppers. In theory his employees would be working remotely once they got home and nothing much was going to change. But in practice it appeared that his employees were all going home and planting themselves straight in front of the TV with a can of lager, and Adrian kept finding himself in the office at nine p.m., answering phone calls and desperately trying to pull various issues together with no backup.
It was almost ten o’clock by the time he got home. Luke was watching the Olympics highlights with a lager in his hand and gave Adrian his customary greeting involving the use of approximately three facial muscles. Adrian joined him with a heavy sigh and his own can of lager and finally dialed up his voice mail service.
Hello, Adrian, this is Dolly Patel. I spoke to you a while ago about the mobile phone? Listen. Funny thing. I found my phone. Or at least my little girl found the phone. It was in her toy box. Right at the bottom. Completely flat, of course. So it wasn’t actually in my bag when it got stolen. Which means it can’t be the phone that woman left in your flat. So, listen, I just spoke to my boss and he says he thinks he knows what happened to Tiffany’s phone. I told him about your wife and he’d like to help. So maybe you could give him a ring? His name is Jonathan Baxter. Here’s his number: 07988 033460. Take care. Bye.
Adrian sat up straight, staring hard at his phone as if it had just spoken to him.
“You all right?” said Luke.
“Er, yeah. Yeah, I think. Hold on, just got a call to make.” He stopped and glanced at the time on his phone. “Is ten o’clock too late, do you think?”
“Too late for what?”
“To call someone.”
“Depends who you’re calling.”
“An estate agent.”
Luke raised an eyebrow.
“No, not for anything like that. It’s the phone. You know, the stalker’s phone? There’s a man who thinks he might know who’s got it. He’s an estate agent.”
Luke sat up straighter, too. “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “No, it’s not too late. Call him. Call him now. He won’t answer it if he doesn’t want to.”
Adrian swallowed down a wave of nervous excitement and dialed in the number.
“Hello?” said an uncertain voice.
Adrian leaned forward, his knees touching the coffee table. “Hi, is that Jonathan Baxter?”
“Yes, speaking.”
“Hello. I’m so sorry to be calling you
so late. My name is Adrian Wolfe and—”
“Ah, hello, yes, I’ve been expecting your call.”
“Is it OK to talk now? I can call tomorrow if that’s more convenient?”
“No, not at all. I’m just here watching the sports. It’s easier to talk now than when I’m at work. So, this phone?”
“Yes, Tiffany’s phone.”
“I gave it to my son,” said Jonathan Baxter. “About four months ago. He said he needed it for his business. He’s a . . . Christ, I’m not sure actually, something to do with the Internet. Anyway. He said he needed a couple of cheap phones and I had a load of them rattling around in a drawer at work; we upgraded everyone to smartphones a few months ago, so they were kind of redundant. I handed them over to Matthew, didn’t think another thing.”
A flash of blue-white clarity exploded through Adrian’s consciousness. “Sorry, sorry. Matthew? Your son is called Matthew?”
“Yes. Why? Do you know him?”
“Well, no, not exactly. But the third time I met the woman who left the phone in my flat, she was with a man called Matthew. On a date.”
Jonathan Baxter grunted. “Not my Matthew then. My Matthew is gay.”
“Well, I assumed they were on a date; she was holding a rose. But is he tall and dark, your son? Short hair? Very good-looking?”
“Yes, I guess that does kind of describe him.”
“Youngish, about thirty?”
“He’s thirty-one.”
“Does he live in north London?”
“Yes. He lives in Highgate.”
There was a short silence. Then Adrian said, “Does your son have a friend called Jane?”
“Not that I’m aware of.”
“Or Amanda?”
“Again, not that I’m aware of. But he does have a lot of female friends. He shares a flat with a girl. Has a lot of girls working for him. I’m not sure I could identify one from the many.”
Adrian sighed. “This one,” he said, “she is remarkably beautiful.”