‘Dear …’ he’d write. ‘As you know this has been a gloomy year for global investment.’
Then he’d put in the bit about the 2008–09 returns of a remarkable 145 per cent, the 2010–11 returns of ninety per cent. Just as a reminder of what he’d done for them. Just as a reminder that they’d opted for the risk, that he hadn’t coerced them.
He’d been invited to their houses in Notting Hill and Little Venice when they were dribbling with greed at the money gushing into their Hoares or Coutts accounts. He’d seen how they lived. The Jeff Koons and Maggi Hambling pictures hanging on the drawing room walls, the Viking stoves in the kitchen, the marble wet rooms, the Prius cars in the garage for the nanny, everything reeking, stinking of money. He’d provided all that for them. Of course it was their money to begin with, and he’d taken his two per cent and then his twenty per cent. But he’d done well for them and he could have taken more. Some managers charged forty-five per cent.
It seemed back then that he had an invisible divining rod for sensing market changes. Even after Lehman Brothers went down, his own client accounts merely shivered for a moment. He hadn’t liked the sniff of the markets and had cashed out in June. By the end of September, he’d felt invincible. For a while anyway.
And what about Sandy? Friends and business, natural foes. He should have known better, shouldn’t have taken Sandy’s paltry sum as a favour. He’d done his best. Never went after Penny with any real intent or any of Sandy’s women, even though he’d wanted to. Paid for everything all the time, lunches, dinners, occasional overdue bills. Years of enabling him to live in that crumbling dissolute way of his.
The taxi turned down the last section of Edith Grove. Jeremy opened the window and smelled the dark mud of the river at low tide. From this distance, it smelled like wet earth. It was only when you got closer that it gave off the rank odour of stale urine, of something deep and rotting. People always thought of the Thames as a benign ribbon of water, but the currents were vicious. Inside the Jezebel, he showered and changed. He made himself a perfect macchiato with a whisper of foam and drank it in his favourite chair opposite the fireplace. Outside the tide was beginning to rise. Water lapped against the hull.
The hay-coloured morning sun frolicked on the waxed oak floors and danced off the canvas of his favourite picture, the Ed Ruscha, all dappled gold and blue water, or sky, or both. Meandering across the canvas was the word ‘Romance’, each white letter in a different font and size.
Sandy used to say the painting reminded him of Gerard Manley Hopkins, that he might have painted something like it if he’d been born in the twentieth century and took to pictures instead of poetry. He said his heart never failed to lift each time he saw it. If he was completely drunk, he’d sway in front of the picture and give a sonorous recitation of ‘Pied Beauty’ as Jeremy smiled indulgently.
Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim…
‘You always say you don’t believe in anything except what is right before your eyes,’ Jeremy had said once as Sandy sank into an armchair and raised his glass. ‘And here you are hero-worshipping an out-of-date, out-of-favour religious zealot.’
‘It’s not about God,’ Sandy replied. ‘It isn’t God-centric. It’s life-centric. It’s about a perfect note moment, when everything falls into place.’ Sandy thought for a bit. ‘Unless we’re talking about the dark sonnets, in which case it’s a bit different.’
He had rolled his eyes and gone to bed, leaving Sandy to let himself out. Sandy was the only man in the world to relate pop art to a Jesuit priest unpublished in his own lifetime. He was a fool, but they went back such a long way.
Jeremy rubbed his stomach. There was that gaseous bloated feeling again, a dull ache in his stomach. Something he ate on the plane. A ticket that cost five and a half thousand pounds and still you couldn’t avoid indigestion. He was tired. Everything was worse when he was tired. He decided to take the rest of the day off. He couldn’t face the office just yet.
Chapter 22
The gendarme said someone would come as soon as possible, but it took an hour or longer before she saw the blue light flashing on the dark lane. She heard the car stop, then voices. They couldn’t find the house. They would turn around and drive away leaving her alone with the door still wide open. She stumbled up the drive in the dark, waving her arms like flags.
‘Help me!’ she screamed. ‘Help me!’ She forgot her pidgin French, but they understood. ‘Everything. They have ruined everything.’
There were two of them and they were kind and calm. One, portly with a moustache, found an unbroken mug and boiled water for tea. The other man stepped across the debris in the kitchen, muttering to himself. He picked his way across the debris and went into the hall, then the sitting room and upstairs.
Penny shivered. Her teeth chattered. They motioned for her to drink the tea, found a chair for her. They said it was probably a local gang. Burglaries had increased markedly since the recession hit and there was local antagonism towards foreigners. A problem everywhere these days. They took fingerprints, swabbed and put things in little plastic bags. They took her through each room and asked what had been taken. Penny told them about the teapot and the jewellery. Nothing else had gone. The television had been upended and her computer was still on the desk. Both were probably too outdated for anyone except her. The gendarmes said she could not stay there that night, not until a locksmith came to change the keys. They went upstairs with her and waited while she packed a bag, then watched as she drove away. In the rear-vision mirror, she saw the portly officer with the moustache wave goodbye.
It was nearly 11 pm, far too late to land on Nigel’s doorstep, but she couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. She had a sudden fierce longing for Sandy, wanted his arms around her. She wanted her children. She wished she’d never moved here.
The lights at Nigel’s house were still on when she climbed the cobbled lane, but she hesitated before she knocked on the door. From inside she heard the scuffle of footsteps and then Nigel asking who was there.
‘It’s me,’ she whispered through the letterbox, then louder, ‘it’s me, Penny. I’m sorry, my house has been robbed. The police have been.’
Nigel opened the door, dressed in a bathrobe, flushed and embarrassed.
On the sofa was a tousle-haired young man. There was a fire burning and a nearly empty bottle of wine on the table. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry. I’m interrupting you. I just … it’s just that I don’t have anywhere else to go.’ She burst into great gasping sobs. ‘It’s ruined, Nigel, everything is ruined. My house, the doll’s house, everything in the kitchen all smashed.’
Nigel put his arms around her. He shushed and cooed and rubbed her back until she stopped shaking. ‘You’re safe now,’ he murmured. ‘Everything will be all right. You’re safe.’
‘They took my mother’s engagement ring,’ she cried. ‘Why would anyone want that?’
The young man poured her the last of the wine. ‘You must drink it,’ he said. ‘Slowly, sip it slowly.’ He made space for her on the sofa.
‘I thought I was safe,’ she whispered, as if to herself. ‘I just wanted to be safe.’
‘You’re safe now,’ said Nigel.
He found her a toothbrush and gave her some towels, then took her up to the tiny attic bedroom, the one reserved for visits from his mother and sister. She lay rigid in the single bed, listening to their muffled conversation, the sound of running water and then the silence.
It was so unfair, all of it. Had she wanted too much? Everyone had told her it was stupid barricading herself in France, leaving Matthew when he was still so vulnerable. But she had to make some move after the divorce. She was drowning in London, no good to Matthew or anyone else. She was smothering him, cooking meals he didn’t want to eat, slipping him cash to ease her guilt over her own incompetence. Emily, ho
me briefly from Edinburgh, had told her to see someone, but she had said she was too tired.
The irony was that she was better off now than Sandy. There was little left after the sale of Onslow Gardens. Sandy hadn’t told her that he’d increased the mortgage at a ruinous rate. But the death of her mother just before she’d moved to France had left her comfortable. A lifetime habit of margarine not butter, and shopping for bargains while pushing everything into premium bonds, had ensured Penny’s economic safety. ‘You have been the joy of my life,’ her mother had written in a note with her will. Penny had studied her careful, small handwriting. ‘I am so proud of the person you are.’
Penny was grateful, but wished her mother had been able to hug her more and criticise less when she was alive, and her mother might not have been so proud of her daughter post divorce, dull and depressed, scared to face up to Matthew’s problems and intimidated by Emily’s confidence.
One afternoon, walking up Hollywood Road past Brinkley’s, she saw a carefully dressed woman about her age sitting at one of the outside tables, determinedly ploughing through a bottle of white wine, pretending to read a book while hoping for one of those men in red trousers with a matching complexion to chat her up. That would be her one day soon, if she didn’t get away.
‘You can’t escape who you are,’ Tim had told her when he dropped in one afternoon.
‘Watch me,’ she’d snapped.
It wasn’t too late to make a new life and try to discover a bit more about herself. But the problem was that she didn’t have a clue who she might be. She’d been a daughter, a wife and a mother, and none of these roles told her anything about herself except how to play the part.
Turning the pillow over now, she wept. She missed Emily and Matthew, the comfort of their small hard bodies in her arms, how they had made her feel strong and capable. Why couldn’t she make herself feel that way?
The next morning Nigel brought her a bowl of coffee, and a croissant from the bakery, still warm. He told her she could stay as long as she liked. ‘You don’t have to go anywhere. I’ll go back to the house with you, make sure everything is all right.’
Penny shook her head. She knew that she needed to walk into her house alone. If she couldn’t do that, she would not be able to live there again.
Nigel tore off a piece of croissant and gave it to her. ‘Eat, my darling. Go back on your own, if you must. I’ll call, make sure you’re all right. We can’t lose you to something like this, Pen. You’re my main man, my partner in gossip. It’s not so bad. You’ll survive.’
She had her doubts as she trundled her bag across the cobbles and began driving out of the town, leaving before the stallholders began setting up for the Wednesday market. Her shoulders ached. She craved a cigarette.
She kept swallowing as she gripped the wheel and carefully negotiated each bend of the steep road. On her lane, the farmer’s wife was weeding her garden, her son toddling beside her. She waved. Penny forced a smile and drove on. No need to stop and alarm her about the breakin. They probably picked her house because she was foreign. All this time she had thought she was safe because people in Sarlat recognised her. She hadn’t realised recognition meant she was an easy target.
The clouds hung low over the mountains. The courtyard flagstones were still slippery from the previous night’s rain. From the outside, the house looked peaceful, undisturbed. She stood looking at its uneven roof, the different coloured pointing where someone had added on a room, the windows placed haphazardly along its length. This was her home. It had given her strength and, in ways she couldn’t articulate, had helped her change into an independent person. She would not be forced out by petty thieves.
Penny opened the kitchen door. The smell of urine was stronger than last night. She stood at the entrance, overwhelmed by the debris, scared and wanting to run away. Instead, she picked through the mess until she reached the cleaning cupboard. She put on a new pair of rubber gloves, locked the door behind her and went to work. The glass in the kitchen was wrapped in newspaper and put in the rubbish bin. The hall table was polished. All the splintered wood from the doll’s house went out to the bonfire.
She wiped everything clean with water and disinfectant, then emptied the bucket, refilled it and repeated the process. She cleared and swept and scrubbed and vacuumed and mopped. She went upstairs and changed her sheets, even though she had not slept in them. She scoured the bath and the basin. She did not stop and she did not allow herself to think or cry.
In the afternoon, a locksmith came, changed all the locks and checked the bolts on the windows. After he left, she boiled a saucepan of vinegar and watched as it spat and sizzled until it finally evaporated. She put the saucepan in the sink and walked into the hall, the wooden boards still bearing damp marks from the mop. Everything smelled of vinegar and furniture polish, sharp and clean.
In the sitting room, she sat on the floor in the empty space where her doll’s house had been. She traced the faint indentations of its perimeter left on the rug. Her finger slowed at one corner. Just here was the drawing room, with the equally positioned side tables and the painted cornices. Above it were the bedrooms, with Matthew’s Lego men tucked under their quilts, the four-poster bed with its chintz swags. Her finger moved to the next corner. Here was the kitchen, the pine table laid for tea, the miniature pots and pans ready for the family’s dinner.
Penny examined her hands, red and swollen from her work, and stared through the window at the last light fading behind the mountains. For the first time since she had come home that morning, she allowed herself to weep.
[email protected]
To: [email protected]
Hey Matt, oh to see your sweet self again, I can’t wait. You’re going to love it here. At least I hope you do. A lot of people I’ve met have been here for years, and they seem so full of, don’t know … is grace a crazy word? Such a relief to believe in something at last, to be away from England and the parents.
Hope I’m making sense. Don’t worry, I’m still the same. I love you and only five more sleeps until I see you. Don’t forget to bring some of that anti-bacterial hand gel stuff. And some strong mosquito repellent. I’ll be at the bus stop. Xxe
Chapter 23
Peter wanted to try the new steakhouse in Hoxton. It would be the first group lunch since Sandy had left hospital and Peter thought something neutral would be best. Sandy might feel more comfortable away from their usual West London haunts. Peter particularly did not want to go to Arthur’s, which he’d come to regard as a bad omen, something to do with Sandy’s accident.
By silent consensus, everyone had agreed to call the incident near the common an accident. Peter thought it was something far more deliberate, and Frieda agreed with him. But he didn’t discuss it with the others. It somehow seemed disloyal to Sandy. Best just to carry on with the usual lunches and conversations. A change of location, however, might be a good idea.
He suggested the steakhouse to Jeremy, but he had told him it was too far away. Peter had hung up thinking Jeremy always had to be in control, deciding on the restaurant, paying the bill more often than necessary just because he was so much richer than the others. In the end, Peter rang back and suggested the wine bar in Ebury Street, familiar ground to them all.
When Peter arrived, Sandy was already sitting in the corner, studiously chewing gum. He stood up and they embraced in their usual way, making sure their torsos never touched.
‘So,’ said Peter after slapping him on the arm one too many times. ‘How is everything?’ He didn’t mean to sound so oblique. It was difficult to know what to say. A man couldn’t ask another man what had made him do such a thing, even if they had known each other for decades.
Sandy stopped chewing. ‘I feel good. That’ll do.’
Peter was about to say how well Sandy looked, without his former bloated flush, but Tim and Jeremy arrived and they began their usual conversation of football and finance. Jeremy admitted his fund had taken a hammering,
but things were looking up.
‘Not like you, to take a loss. It has to be the first dip in your profits for a long time,’ said Peter.
Jeremy fiddled with his napkin and looked away. His face was paler than usual and there was a small arrow of grey stubble high on his cheekbone that he’d missed when shaving. Next to him, Sandy looked robust and healthy.
‘You’ll be back on top in a nanosecond,’ said Sandy, raising his glass of water to Jeremy. ‘Give yourself six months. You’ll be bigger and better than ever.’
It was typical of Sandy, thought Peter, to be so loyal, as if he’d taken a schoolboy vow to be Jeremy’s cheerleader until they both stopped breathing.
‘Thanks, my friend,’ said Jeremy. ‘There are some things I like the look of. Some companies in Brazil and a few other countries look promising. Now, what about our team this weekend?’
Tim thought Chelsea was on cracking form and everyone agreed before ordering hamburgers. Jeremy chose the wine. Sandy asked for fizzy water.
The night before, Frieda had bet him one hundred pounds none of them would ask Sandy anything about what happened, or why. Halfway through lunch, he knew he was in her debt. Everything was the same. There was a moment, during coffee, when Peter thought Tim was about to launch into therapy speak, but it dribbled off into an innocuous question.
‘So what now?’ Tim asked with a vague wave of his hands.
‘You know,’ replied Sandy, ‘I thought more of the same, less of the other. I’ll stay in Battersea for the time being. I only have to give three months’ notice if I decide anything. Penny said I could stay with her for a while if I wanted.’ He shrugged.
After Everything Page 14