His answer was muffled: she made herself wait, smiling as he straightened and handing him a bowl. ‘No?’ she said.
‘Mum—’ he frowned.
She held up her hands palms out: ‘Sorry, nosy—’ she said, apologetically.
He went on looking at her, only puzzled. A second passed. He shrugged. ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen her around, at school. She’s not in my year. We did the maths challenge together last year. She’s good at maths.’
Good at maths: the information went in and out again, she couldn’t retain it. Hastily Bridget said, not even knowing where it came from, if it was a smokescreen or what it was. ‘She isn’t Phoebe?’
Had that thought been there all along? She knew the girl’s name wasn’t Phoebe. She needed a way in, to finding out.
‘No—’ Still bewildered. ‘Phoebe’s—’ and Finn tipped his head, trying to work out what was going on: something was going on. ‘If it had been Phoebe I’d have said.’ Indignantly.
Quick. Quick.
‘Sorry, stupid, yes, of course you would,’ and then Bridget was laughing it off, she was turning to steer him into the sitting room so that he wouldn’t remember how her face had looked, back there among the silver birches where he had used to splash in the stream in his red shiny boots.
Because it was a look all children knew: the look that says, caught out; guilty; frightened. Terrified. And the first time a child saw that in an adult’s face, in a parent’s face, suddenly everything was different.
Chapter Seven
Monday
Bridget was on her knees in front of the fridge in old jeans, mopping water: she was defrosting the freezer. It had taken her a year or two of running the shop to understand that almost no one went shopping for clothes on a Monday. Who knew why: too gloomy at being back at work after the weekend, too domestic after a family Sunday. Whatever: Mondays she kept it closed and did everything that needed doing at home.
Matt often came home for lunch on Monday and on the table in the kitchen was nice bread with a dark crust he liked and some cheese and pickles from the deli. It was half a mile away in the older streets where the town began, a little place on a Victorian corner with an old bacon slicer and shelves full of bright jars like jewels. November tomatoes: she’d spent a good five minutes surreptitiously picking out the good ones, the ones that had a distant smell of summer on them. We could go on holiday, she had thought, holding the tomato, a spark of hope, now, tomorrow, next week. Somewhere, anywhere, disappear to a bothy on a Scottish beach or a cheap hotel in Tunisia. Anything. She’d even got as far as taking out her phone, to tell Matt.
But it was term time: another month for Finn, another fortnight for Matt. And Matt’s mother invited for Christmas. Christmas seemed as far off as summer: the holiday conversation seemed almost as impossible to have safely as the emigration conversation.
Her knees were wet, her hair coming undone where she’d tied it back. Over the jeans she wore an old soft green sweatshirt, faded almost to grey. Her customers wouldn’t recognise her but this was Matt’s favourite Bridget. He would put his hands up under the wide sleeves of the sweatshirt to hold her forearms, as if he just wanted to feel her skin. As if the clothes didn’t matter but her body underneath them, as if she was something lovely. She stood up and reached for the big blunt knife she used to chip at the ice.
Plenty of men had presided from the shop’s sofa with the newspaper on their knee giving their demands – frowning at their wives, shaking their heads. Tighter, brighter, shorter, they mostly wanted, though others were more precise about it. It had to be a certain length, a certain height of neckline, or heel. Or, isn’t that a bit young for you? And the woman’s face falling. She dug the knife in harder, sawing at the ice, working up a sweat. Trying not to think of a man wanting to doll a woman up. A child.
But mostly men stayed away, and Bridget was much more at her ease that way. She could focus on the women, because even bad-tempered ones, dissatisfied ones, could be coaxed round usually. She had perceived a difference: the happy ones were more beautiful, whatever their actual attributes. Make them happy and they will look good.
Was she happy? She paused, with the knife in her hand and her fingers numbing. Before this. Yes. Yes.
Then there was the inverse. The girl wanting to please him. Inverting the formula: make them insecure, make them think they look bad and they’ll be unhappy. They’ll try harder, looking for the happiness. The unhappy ones spent and spent and spent and it didn’t work: they stared at themselves in the mirror trying to see something, someone else.
Isabel’s parents had looked kind. How could you tell? You could. But were they clever enough to know what was happening? A big chunk of ice came loose and Bridget dropped it into the bucket at her feet: nearly there.
There must be a way of getting her away from him. She reached for a tea towel and mopped at her face, then picked the knife up again.
There was a sound at the front door.
‘Matt?’ She stood there, the knife in her hand. An indistinct sound came in return: had he lost his keys? She padded down the corridor, cheerful, but as she reached to pull the door open, something shifted. The shape of a head through the wavy glass, or the quality of the light outside: she didn’t know what did it but in that moment the world – her world – seemed to divide itself. There was inside and outside, there was home and there were strangers, and the door was there to protect her.
The bell rang, loud, and with the sound time subdivided, there was one fraction of a second left in which she could hide, stay inside. Never leave. She opened the door.
It was the postman, a man she knew with a bulbous nose and a cheerful smile, holding out a small parcel addressed to Finn. ‘Another computer game, is it?’ he said, and that was what it looked like. Bridget had to sign for it on his electronic pad, squinting to see in the brightening light and then, raising her head as she handed it back, she saw him. She froze. There, over the postman’s retreating back, standing on the far corner of the close beside a flashy little black car with his hands in his pockets and looking around.
It was Anthony Carmichael. He stepped away from the car and turned, slowly.
She swayed, blinked, then stepped back into her hall so fast she stumbled, held on to the doorframe, then flattened herself against the wall. The door sat open: step into the light, it said. Show yourself. She fumbled with an outstretched hand trying to get a purchase on the door’s panels without being seen and then it moved, she could reach the latch and pull it towards her. Her fingers on the latch were like someone else’s, nerveless and uncooperative. The door clicked to, quietly.
Call me Tony, he’d said, after the first lesson in his big living room, with the mirror over the mantelpiece and brocade sofas and oil paintings – and with his wife, always out somewhere when he gave lessons. Drawing his finger down her cheek while she stood, mesmerised by the newness of it, a man she didn’t know touching her face. Shocked and fascinated: what would happen next? She had had no idea.
Now she stood in the hall with her heart racing so fast she thought it could kill her. That would be all right, she thought for a horrible empty moment, drop dead here, natural causes, all right. She squeezed her eyes shut but his image was imprinted on them, details: the way his head moved, how his neck looked, emerging from his collar, the thin hair. He had been wearing a leather jacket. The kind of leather jacket a man buys when he has no idea what it makes him look like. She even knew what it would smell like, like a leather settee, leather too new, too cheap, an animal smell, and she felt suddenly so sick she opened her eyes.
Her hand hurt: she looked down. She had dropped the parcel the postman had brought but was still holding the knife she’d been using on the ice. The handle broken, the tip snapped off, useless, but the blade had dug into her palm. She unclenched her hand but kept hold of the knife and walked, two steps, three, across the hall and into the sitting-room doorway.
The room was flooded with light
from the big bay window that looked out into the close but Bridget stepped back, feeling her heart pound in her throat, a pulse so strong she thought it must be visible through her skin. In that moment she became acutely aware that she had no bra on under the sweatshirt, she felt the thin worn fabric against her breasts. She felt naked, as exposed as if she was standing in the wind on the street corner naked and all the neighbours at their windows. She blinked, swallowed. Go away. She made herself advance, a millimetre, a centimetre.
From where Bridget stood she could see only the mound of privet that bordered their little piece of front garden, two palings of their picket fence, a foot of pavement. The close was suddenly so quiet that she could hear the high drone of an aircraft turning to fly out across the estuary towards Europe. She edged around the door, behind the sofa, hands behind her feeling for the wall, until she was at the corner of the bay where the curtain hung. There was a shadow on the pavement, two pillars of shade that might have been legs, a man standing lordly outside her house, then the cloud moved, the light uncertain, and there wasn’t. She heard footsteps then the clump of a car door and then she darted forward, then it was too late to run out and shout at him, Leave her alone. Leave her alone, you fucker.
The close was empty, bleached pale in winter afternoon light. Then a flicker as a bicycle turned the corner, a head down over handlebars. Matt. Matt. Home for lunch.
Running clumsily back into the house Bridget threw herself on to her knees in front of the fridge. She was still there in her rubber gloves, bathed in sweat, when Matt walked in five minutes later.
‘What was this doing in the hall?’ he said, half laughing, half frowning. He had the old breadknife in his hand. She stood, shaky. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked, putting his hand up as if to touch her cheek and she flinched. ‘Is it that bug?’
‘No – it – the postman – I was holding it and I had to answer the door,’ she said, although she had no idea when or how it had got there. Matt had put the knife down on the table and was taking off his backpack, peering down at the lunch. He said nothing about seeing anyone leaving the house. About a little black car passing him on the road and a man in an ugly leather jacket turning to examine him, her husband on his bike.
Matt only ever stayed an hour, for their Monday lunches. He was uneasy with pushing rules, and they needed him, up there on Rose Hill. The busiest man in the university, as they all came to him to sort their connections or salvage their hard drive and patiently he would comply: happily.
Carrie had said once, wonderingly, ‘I did think he was boring, to start. Your Matt. Mr nerdy.’ She didn’t say what had changed her mind. The thought of Carrie set something off that Bridget had to push out of her head.
When he pulled his waterproof jacket back on she said without turning from the sink, ‘I thought I might cycle back up with you. For the exercise.’
Because she couldn’t stay here, cowering behind the front door, too scared to make a noise in case the neighbours heard. Never mind that Rose Hill and the university might be where he was, Carmichael: never mind that. Let him see her walk up to his front door.
‘You sure?’ he stopped with his backpack halfway hoisted on to his shoulder.
She shrugged. ‘I just fancy some fresh air,’ she said.
They cycled side by side, Matt upright with one hand keeping his handlebars straight. Daring a glance sideways Bridget wondered: perhaps she could tell him what happened. She could point to Carmichael, and say, That man—
The last stretch uphill to the university was a slog, heads down: as it levelled out and they sailed past the car park she scanned it, but saw no jaunty little black car. It was cold in the deep shade as Matt locked the bikes, and there didn’t seem to be anyone venturing outside except the odd figure hurrying between the buildings. Bridget didn’t come up here often, occasionally to meet Matt after work. For all he sung its praises, it wasn’t hospitable. A constant stiff, cold breeze blew, eddying around the foot of the towers, lifting and scattering the water in the concrete fountain. The campus had a concert hall, a theatre, a bar: she could see the student café from where she stood, orange plastic chairs and some posters lifting at the corners in the wind. The views from the towers over the river were supposed to be breathtaking but Matt’s office was on the ground floor, a place of constant traffic.
‘Stop for a cup of tea?’ he said shyly, handing her the key to her lock. They set out across the deserted piazza to his room.
They’d heard about the suicide when they arrived, it had happened years before, even then: a PhD student who’d thrown herself out of a high window, and it turned out she had been having an affair with her tutor. She didn’t even live in the towers but in digs in the town: she’d come up for the purpose, and they never worked out how she got through the glass. According to the caretaker, now long dead, who’d liked to tell the story that the sound of her battering against it had gone on for twenty, thirty minutes before she made it through, but no one had thought to trace the noise to its source.
She hadn’t fallen between the buildings, said the old man telling the story in his subterranean office all that time ago, but on the far side, facing out to sea. She’d have looked out across the famous view, as she’d hammered against the glass: the estuary that looked brown or green or silver, according to the time of day and the state of the tide, its muddy banks appearing delicate as lace from high up in the tower.
For once there was no one waiting outside Matt’s office, and he busied himself with the kettle, pleased to have her there. She stood talking to his back, looking out of the window towards the ugly fountain instead of at him.
‘One of your colleagues came into the shop, the other week,’ she said. ‘From the Faculty of Music, he told us he’d just arrived.’ She stopped then, she didn’t dare say anything more because Matt would know, just from the tone of her voice, that something was up.
He turned, holding out the mugs, pleased with himself. He’d hardly heard what she said. The idea that she could tell him, she saw clearly now, had been a fantasy: it would all become public, unstoppable. Matt would go to the police.
‘What?’ he said standing beside her and for a moment she thought she’d have to repeat it. ‘Oh, yes. Faculty of Music.’ He looked across the piazza at the far tower, where the concert hall was. Bridget had never been inside: Matt had stopped mentioning what was on there years back but she didn’t think he was that bothered. He’d never been into classical music. ‘Did he say what his name was?’
She shook her head. ‘Not far off retirement?’
‘Dr Carmichael,’ said Matt without hesitation. ‘Yes, we were lucky to get him, apparently; some connection with the place, I suppose. Everyone’s falling over themselves to keep him happy. Very eminent, he’s taken up a two-year appointment.’
Two years. Her heart sank. Matt was speaking levelly, looking out across the windswept space, not giving anything away. ‘It’s good people like him want to come and work here, isn’t it?’ Perhaps Matt just wasn’t interested. That would be good.
Why, though? That was what Bridget needed to know. Why had he come? To make him leave, you had to know why he was there.
Had it really been him, standing on the corner of the close? The car had been real. A little black car, how could she have imagined that? But now she didn’t know. The man in the ugly leather jacket, could it have been any middle-aged man?
As if he could hear her thoughts Matt was musing on it. ‘By all accounts he’s just a nice guy,’ he said, echoing what Laura had said, but not convinced, frowning. She knew Matt’s face as well as she knew her own. She wondered if he’d actually talked to Carmichael. ‘He’s involved in some community music scheme, the other music fellow’s idea. Talks in schools, that kind of stuff.’ He turned to her, his head elsewhere. ‘I did wonder if we should have got Finn into it. Music.’
At the thought of Finn Bridget felt panic surge, uncontrollable. ‘Oh, Finn,’ she said, at random, ‘that reminds me. I’ve
got to – got to—’ Matt was looking at her. ‘He asked me to get him a new jumper,’ she said, and it was even true. ‘I’d better – before the shops close. Get going.’
It was downhill into town and Bridget rode it at speed, reckless. The sun was low and she had no lights: she went straight to a men’s shop that was a bit grown up for Finn but cool, and they knew her in there. Their shops had opened around the same time and she and the manager, a nice guy with a beard, saw each other at the dreary meetings for independent retailers, winking across the stuffy room in the town hall. Everyone knew everyone else, didn’t they? It was what Carmichael had said. The manager chatted with her as she paid, about how time flew, how grown up Finn was getting.
‘He’s got a girlfriend now, can you believe it?’ she said, feeling herself calm, among friends. Finn would grow up, get married, to Phoebe or to someone else, she and Matt would retire.
Buoyed up just enough she went to the supermarket to get something for dinner: browsing the shelves, she sent Finn a text asking what food Phoebe liked.
He answered straight away, obediently. just anything mum, she’s very cool. not fussy. but i’ll ask her, i’m seeing her after school not sure when I’ll be home. She gazed at the little screen, the words conveying worship. Bridget wondered what she looked like.
Loading the bags into her bike basket – the sweater, a chicken for roasting, pasta and salad and Finn’s favourite ice cream – she had a glimpse of the future: Finn would leave home, he would have another life.
Knowing about Carmichael would blight that, would blight everything, would send him running. She wanted him to always want to come home again, bringing his girlfriend with him.
She’s very cool. What was she going to make of their small, odd family? For some reason she had identified Phoebe with Isabel: her family looked happy, orderly, loving, normal. That was the kind of girl Finn would want, he was like his dad.
What We Did_A gripping, compelling psychological thriller with a nail-biting twist Page 5