‘Thank you,’ I say eventually.
‘I hadn’t realised things were bad between you. I know he was a bit upset when you danced with Angus at the staff party . . .’
I look at her and away quickly. Angus, one of the NQTs, had grabbed my hand before I could stop him. It meant nothing. I knew Zach was watching, his eyes hot, in the corner. When I disentangled myself from the dance, Zach twisted my arm behind my back and said things in my ear that no one else should have heard. Jane didn’t see. Someone must have told her.
‘He could be a bit jealous,’ I say. ‘It was just a blip.’
‘Really?’ She bends to peer into my eyes. ‘And the person who left the flowers? Did you work out who that was?’
‘Xenia? No.’
‘I was thinking, perhaps it was someone who witnessed the accident? No one he knew at all.’
‘It could have been.’ I have to be careful. She knows me so well. ‘Maybe it was a good thing I went off the rails a bit at the weekend,’ I add cautiously. ‘Perhaps I needed it, one last maelstrom of madness before I could move on.’
‘“One maelstrom of madness’’?’ she says, raking an eyebrow. I’m relieved to see she is smiling. ‘Poor Lizzie. It will get better.’
She starts walking again and I know I’ve got away with it. It’s back to being Zach and me now, like it always was.
We take our usual walk, down the hill, through the trees to the lake, silver and still in its deep hollow, like something from a fairy story, and then up through the woods to skirt around the rim of the golf course. Howard chases squirrels and rabbits and rooks. Patches of wildness, swathes of manicured grass, twisted trees, overhanging branches, thick hedgerows. Wimbledon Common changes all the time. When the roar of the A3 is cancelled by a dip in the landscape or a particularly thick thatch of undergrowth, you can imagine yourself in wooded depths far out of London. It does me good to pace. I wish I hadn’t remembered the staff party. I ran out after the Angus incident. Zach caught up with me on the common. He was drunk – alcohol didn’t mix well with the pills he took for his anxiety. He begged my forgiveness. He didn’t know what had come over him, he said. He needed me so much. I try to concentrate on the weight and tug of Jane’s arm linked in mine, not think about him, out there alone.
On the last stretch of bridle path, when we can see the tip of the windmill hoving into view above the canopy of trees, we start chatting about school. Jane slips Sam Welham into the conversation. She bumped into him buying okra and coriander in Tooting Market the day before, shopping for ingredients for a curry.
‘Nice,’ I say.
‘He asked after you. He knew it had been the anniversary. He was concerned.’
‘Kind of him.’
Jane, who worked with Sam at a previous school, has told me several times what an idiot his wife was for leaving him. She tells me this again. She also informs me that he asked if she could recommend a dentist.
‘And did you?’ I say.
‘Yes. I did.’
‘Excellent.’
‘He’s nice, Lizzie,’ she says.
‘I know he is.’
‘Zach would want you to be happy.’
I catch my breath. The simplicity of her words makes me want to weep. Her arm has unlinked from mine. ‘I know he would.’
‘I’m just saying.’
‘I know you are.’
I drive home a different route – through Wimbledon Village and down Plough Road, past the greyhound stadium. Zach rented a unit in an industrial estate behind this, an old warehouse that had been converted into a rabbit warren of studios.
I pull into the huge stadium car park and switch off the engine. Metal racks for the Sunday market are scattered, upended. A pile of cardboard boxes, crushed flat and sodden, lies by the entrance.
I’ve been here once before – shortly after his accident, to clear his studio. I was still in a state then. Jane came with me. The caretaker, a young man with long sideburns, used a skeleton key to open his door. I couldn’t bear to look – all his work in progress, the piles of paintings and brown paper, the paints, all that evidence of his interrupted life – and I hung back to let Jane go ahead of me. She just stood in the doorway, not moving. After a bit, I stepped forward. There was nothing there. A bare easel. Bare walls. Scrubbed floor. Three bottles of white spirit lined up, labels parallel. We’d bought Jane’s estate to fit it all in. I could have carried the residue of his working life on the back of a bike.
Jane said some horrible person must have taken it, heard he was dead and broken in to steal what remained of his stuff.
Now I’m not sure. It’s playing on my mind: did he come back to retrieve it himself?
I get out of the car into a puddle. The warehouse is around the corner, in a run-down street pitted with potholes. It’s a low-slung Victorian building, all wrought iron and fire escapes, small windows. The door this end is open and I walk straight in. An entrance hall, painted neon pink. An archway leads to the main corridor. The air smells of turpentine and heat, chemicals and wet earth. The buzz of a saw, a hammer banging, tinny pop music from a distant radio.
Most of the doors are open. An old man is crouching in the first unit, taking pliers to an eviscerated armchair; in the next, an aproned woman is bent over a mud-splattered kiln. I pass a watercolourist, a screen-printer, a scrap-metal artist, a young girl making sculptures out of bandages and pins. They all look too busy to interrupt.
The music is coming from the kitchen, a double unit halfway along, where a woman with spiky black hair and a ring through her eyebrow is warming up lunch in the microwave. She looks vaguely familiar. I’ve met her before. She came to Zach’s funeral. She might know something.
I say hello and tell her who I am. She nods. Yes. Her name is Maria and she is a knitter. It is true, she was at my husband’s funeral. Someone had rung the caretaker to tell them about it and she and her friend Suzie, who is a sculptress, had decided to go. ‘It was not so far.’
I smile, but her words sting. She makes it sound like a trip to the cinema.
‘Such a shame,’ she adds. ‘Such a lovely, handsome man.’
The microwave pings and she takes out a tray of ready-made teriyaki chicken with rice. I sit down opposite her. I’ve got to be careful. We talk about how it is a year since it happened, and I explain that I am trying to piece together a few facts. His empty studio, for example: did she think anyone here might have taken his stuff?
Maria looks uneasy. ‘We are a close community,’ she says. ‘Artists, not thieves.’
‘OK. Of course. I’m just surprised how little he had.’
She shakes her head. ‘Zach, his door was always closed,’ she says. ‘We have open days twice a year to show our work, to give wine, to sell. But Zach, he locked his door. He never joined in. He told me that his work was no good. I don’t know what his studio was like.’
‘How odd of him.’
‘Some people here it is chat chat chat, but Zach he talked with his eyes. Such beautiful blue eyes.’
‘They were very arresting,’ I say. ‘His eyes. Did anyone ever come here? Did he have visitors?’
She shakes her head. Her mouth is full of chicken. ‘No.’
‘Do you know of anyone here called Xenia?’
‘No. No Xenia. Not that I know.’
‘And he really kept himself to himself?’
She puts her finger in the air while she swallows. ‘He used to tap-tap on his laptop. Long emails. Once, he was upset. I can’t remember when. His face was red. I saw him later as he was leaving and asked if he was all right. I don’t like people to be unhappy. I am a kind soul.’
‘I am sure you are.’
I watch her eating for a little longer. She smiles at me a couple of times.
‘His studio,’ she says. ‘A photographer is in there now. Very nice man.’
‘Good.’
I can’t wait to leave after this, think about this image of Zach and his closed door, his private angu
ish. I hurry out of the building and back to the car. I see a hole in the chain fence I hadn’t noticed before and crawl through, standing up too quickly and snagging my anorak on a loose wire.
My car is the other side of the lot, over by the café. I begin to walk towards it, but then I stop.
A figure is standing between the bonnet and the fence, leaning in. Floppy hair, a thick overcoat, one shoulder slightly hunched. I feel a rush of triumph – and, at the same time, of terror. I begin to run, stumbling over the potholes. Muddy rainwater splashes up my jeans. My vision blurs. The car park spins. I miss my footing, trip, stagger and fall. Hands in the gravel, knees sodden, face inches from the ground. I sit up and get to my feet.
An item of clothing – a dangling black sweatshirt, hanging limply – is poked into a hole in the fence above the bonnet.
Zach has gone.
Zach
March 2010
I am in Cornwall for a few days. It’s cold and bleak, miserable without a car. I was going to drive down in Charlotte’s Golf, but a bottle of milk had spilled on the passenger seat and, although she says she scrubbed it clean, I can still taste it at the back of my throat, sour and curdled like the skin of an old person.
The wind on the clifftop walk to the village is icy. I managed to lug a bag of logs up from the farm shop to make a fire. It lasted an hour, but I couldn’t keep the logs straight. As they burned, one of them kept slipping out of place. I tried not to look, but it was no good. My eye was constantly drawn. I couldn’t sit still. I felt as if my skin were crawling. In the end, I stamped out the flames with my foot. I’m waiting for the ashes to cool so I can sweep out the grate. I’ll feel better when it’s clean. If I had a car, I could drive to the Shell garage for rectangular eco briquettes. You can line those up.
This agitation, it’s much worse than usual, even with the pills. I’m not in control.
The double life is killing me. It’s the frustration, the sense that everything could be settled, lined up, but it isn’t. I’m like one of those businessmen who keep it up for years. One week in Maidstone, the next in Maida Vale. Charlotte is at work too much to notice my absences, busy with what she has begun to refer to as her ‘proper job’ – a dig. And Lizzie’s demands are mild in comparison to other women I’ve known. Content to see me when I make myself available, she never nags at me to meet her friends, or hang out with her family, or attend dinner parties or christenings of babies I’ve never set eyes on belonging to people I wish I never had.
The lack of pressure makes me want to see her more. I feel as if I’m going out of my mind.
Can’t sleep. Can’t paint. Somewhere along the way, I’ve lost my day job. Jim, the bastard, found a student from the uni to do the metal casting, says I didn’t show enough ‘commitment’. He owes me money from that last commission, says he’s keeping a couple of pictures as collateral. What a stupid fuss. Just because I didn’t get round to paying for that last stash, and missed a couple of appointments. I knew he was tight, that he wouldn’t reach into his pocket unless he had to. But unscrupulous? I didn’t expect that. Luckily I’ve still got his bike. He thinks it was nicked by the homeless guy who used to doss outside the studio. People are so narrow-minded. I keep it in London now, securely locked, along with my new white helmet, to the railings at the station. It isn’t theft. It’s payment in kind.
Time is hanging ludicrously heavy. It’s ridiculous we’re still where we are, that nothing has changed. Lizzie has agreed that a home is what her mother needs. The Beeches in Colliers Wood has a vacancy. It’s perfectly adequate. But Lizzie keeps going on about her ‘head’ and her ‘heart’ – as if they are separate items. She cried the other night. She said she’d always felt so worthless, that Peggy was her mother’s favourite, and she – Lizzie – had hoped that by looking after her through her final illness, she would have a chance to prove her worth. But she’d failed at that, too. Her mother was right. She was a waste of space.
I felt a surge of fury – that stuck-up old woman and that uptight snobby sister of hers. Lizzie is worth more than both of them put together. How toxic families are. And of course Peggy herself isn’t helping matters. She’s not at all happy about Mommy Dearest being ‘looked after by strangers’. What she wants is for Lizzie to carry on sacrificing her life so Peggy can happily carry on living hers guilt-free.
I persuaded Lizzie to go round for a ‘family meeting’. While we were there, I said: ‘I suppose you could take it in turns. Even when the baby comes, the lovely thing about this house is that you have so much space.’ After that Peggy changed her tune pretty sharpish.
The wind dropped today. I passed Alan Murphy, Victoria’s tosspot husband, running on the beach early this morning, shoulder to shoulder with a younger man – an aide, or a personal assistant, or a bodyguard. He was out of breath and when he put out an arm to wave, he stumbled briefly. I doubt he recognised me, probably just saw ‘Voter’ plastered across my head. He’s a crony of the new Tory leader. Getting fit for office, no doubt. Well, I tell you what he can’t count on. My vote, that’s what. He was never the sort of man Vic used to go for when we were young. She used to be such a laugh. She’s changed, become conscious of her own standing, lost her spirit.
I was heading towards St Enodoc Church, just to clear my head, and I’d reached the point where the rocks end and the beach suddenly stretches out, stippled and striped, when I saw a figure dressed in black crouched on the sand. Mist was still licking at the cliffs, curling off the golf course. No one else in sight.
When I got a bit closer, I could see it was a girl, about fourteen or fifteen, and she was crying. She looked up at me and there was something about her eyes, swollen as they were, that stopped me; very blue, piercing. They seemed to drill straight through you.
I said, ‘You OK?’
‘What’s it to you?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Well . . .’ a jut of her chin. ‘I’m not then. No.’
I asked what her name was and she said Onnie. Vic and Murphy’s child. That’s why she looked familiar, though she was skinnier and spottier than the last time I’d seen her.
‘Well, you can’t sit out on that wet sand,’ I said. ‘You’ll get worms.’
‘That’s not how you get them,’ she said. ‘You get them from chewing your nails.’
‘Well, you clearly know more about it than I do. I bow to your superior knowledge and no doubt experience.’
She stuck out her tongue, which made me laugh.
I was about to walk on but she called after me. ‘I’m running away.’
‘Oh yes?’ I stopped to listen.
She told me she was at boarding school and she hated it. Some girl was bullying her, excluding her from conversations, telling her she couldn’t sit on her table at lunch.
I told her to stay put, wait it out, to pay the little bitch back in her own time. ‘You know the saying?’ I said. ‘Revenge is a dish best served cold.’
She made a face as if to say, ‘Whatever.’
I blew her a kiss and walked on.
Back in Brighton. I can’t believe it. I’ve got to get out. London and Lizzie – I can’t stop thinking about both.
It’s all going wrong.
We were in the pub last night and Charlotte started flirting with the barman, leaning forward so he could look down her cleavage. She was trying to get my attention, make herself desirable, and I wouldn’t have cared except she did it in front of Pete and Nell. It was disrespectful. She made me look like an idiot.
We were climbing the stairs to the flat at the end of the evening and she started on again about Cornwall. She should have known when to stop. She was fumbling for her keys and the sight of her tarty leopard-skin coat falling off her shoulder, the smear of lipstick on her teeth, was too much for me. I told her to shut up and at the same time my hand impacted with her face. She wobbled and almost slipped. If I hadn’t grabbed her, she would have tumbled all the way to the bottom. It’s lethal, that seagrass.
>
She screamed at me and I begged forgiveness, told her how much she meant to me, how if anything happened to her, I wouldn’t know what to do with myself. I promised I’d get out my toolbox at the weekend, and nail the loose seagrass down.
Chapter Nine
Lizzie
I have promised to look after Peggy’s kids during half-term, to give her a break, and on Wednesday she brings them round.
She hovers in the hall, eager to get away. She and Rob, she tells me, are so desperate for some ‘us time’ they are ‘literally on the verge of divorce’. They are planning a lunch and a movie and dinner and what have you, and then home for a shag, ‘if that’s not TMI’. I never used to notice the way Peggy talks. She was just Peggy. Zach drew my attention to it, how she repeats certain words, or picks up phrases she has heard. I see her more clearly now, but I sometimes wish I didn’t. The older two have each packed a suitcase, though Gussie’s consists mainly of jewellery from the dressing-up box.
I take them swimming at the Latchmere, where there’s a wave machine, and then for chicken and chips and unlimited refills at Nando’s, and then a stomp over the common with the dog and the buggy to the big playground. Back home, we empty out the cupboards to create magic potions – fizzing up our gruesome concoctions with a teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda. We play snap until Gussie gets cross, then decorate pizzas until, finally, we throw ourselves on to my bed and watch the DVD of Stuart Little I bought last week.
I have made up the sofa bed in the study but we end up sleeping where we are, with Gussie starfished across the mattress, Alfie hogging the duvet, Chloe curled in my arms. I sleep fitfully. Foxes in the garden disturb the dog and he barks intermittently. I lie there, wondering if Zach watched me out with the kids. He used to tell me Peggy took advantage, that I should stand up to her. But I love them. I love my sister too. He never seemed to understand that.
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