“Sorry, I just find it a little . . . offensive. All this money. For one flat.”
“But you want to buy it?”
“Yes, please. And I’d like to buy the furniture too. If it’s for sale.” In fact, Daniel had been told in no uncertain terms by his father that renting was not an option. It was considered a complete waste of money—his father’s money, really, as Daniel had a trust fund. If the flat passed his father’s scrutiny, it would become a family investment. “Anyway, one flat’s much the same as another, isn’t it?”
Cherry opened her mouth to speak.
“Of course, it’s not! No, no, sorry . . . Consider me very ignorant. But . . . I was just thinking . . . there are better things we could be doing with our time.”
She braced herself, knowing what was coming next.
“Are you free tonight by any chance? Could I take you out for supper?”
Cherry always found it amusing the way rich people called it “supper,” as if they’d never quite left boarding school. At least, it gave her a little more confidence that he actually might be able to afford the flat he’d just so casually declared he’d have. This was actually her last appointment of the day; they were supposed to have seen the others the following morning. All she needed to do was return the keys to the office and the evening was hers. She thought about her plans, a ride home on a sweaty tube that delivered other workers to various parts of South London that diminished in salubrity as the seats were emptied. She always felt left behind, the poor relation by the time they reached Tooting Broadway, but at least, she thought with a shudder, she wasn’t quite at the end of the line. Then it was a quick stop in Sainsbury’s to get something to eat before returning to her tiny flat with no hallway. She’d hang up her precious suit with the others, the most valuable things she owned, and then no doubt would spend the evening studying property on the Internet and wondering just when she might be able to get out of there. She looked up at her client. She liked him, liked his devil-may-care attitude. It made a change from those who turned a property down because the bathroom fittings were chrome and not brass, and were offended when the seller wouldn’t change them before closing. Why not go out for supper with this man, she thought. It was, after all, the reason she’d worked so hard to get a job in this part of town in the first place.
3
Saturday, June 7
LAURA SAT IN HER USUAL SEAT, AT A RIGHT ANGLE TO HER HUSBAND, and picked at her grilled-chicken salad. All the windows in their large, airy dining room were open, but it still felt oppressive. She’d spent a languorous afternoon in the garden. Daniel had been sprawled out on a lounger, she under the giant umbrella. He would answer her questions, with eyes closed against the sun, laughing at her enthusiasm to know everything about Cherry; she was taking full advantage of the fact he couldn’t see her drink him in. Then, just when she’d stood to go and start cooking, he’d opened his eyes and sat up, with an awkward look on his face.
“I meant to say . . .”
She turned back, a smile on her face.
“I sort of promised Cherry . . . It’s a concert. In the park . . . I’m sorry, I know I said I’d stay home with you and Dad. . . .”
She quickly swallowed her disappointment and brushed off his apologies, telling him to go and enjoy himself.
Laura looked down the length of the empty gleaming formal table that seated ten, with just her and Howard clutching the end as if they were on a sinking ship, and suddenly felt an overwhelming irritation with it and the bizarre way in which they sat, following some dead ritual for so long neither of them questioned it.She turned her gaze to him. He didn’t seem bothered by the table, the heat, the fact they’d stopped talking to each other. He was reading the day’sTelegraph,with his glasses pushed up onto his forehead, while filling his mouth with salad and new potatoes. He’d been out all afternoon—she was used to that—but now he was back and she wanted to talk. She heard the chink of his knife on the china plate, the Mozart playing in the background, and her voice intruding sounded alien.
“Anything interesting?”
He didn’t look up. “Just the golf.”
The golf.She felt a twitch of hurt. That was one of the few things he still got excited about. That, and Marianne, of course. She never knew which he was really doing. He’d always tell her it was the golf, every Saturday, Sunday, and some weekday afternoons too, when he could get out of the office. However, she knew—knew by the way he came back a little happier, a private happiness he kept within himself—which days he’d seen her. It wasn’t that it was a surprise; that had come twenty years ago when she’d first discovered the affair. Mrs. Moore had gone through his pockets before taking the suits to the dry cleaners and left the receipts on the kitchen worktop. She’d seen them at breakfast, after Howard had already left for work, and Laura knew in absolute certainty she’d not received those flowers, nor had she been taken to lunch the previous Saturday. He denied it at first, of course, but she knew, and eventually he angrily admitted it—as if it was her fault.
“All right, it’s true. Are you happy now?”
It was the wrong choice of words. Of course, she wasn’t happy, her world had just imploded, and then she discovered it had been going on for two years and he was in love with Marianne. She was married, too, though, had young children, and wasn’t prepared to split up the family. Laura considered leaving him—she had some money, so she would’ve been all right—but there was Daniel to think about. And Howard, in an emotional outburst, said he didn’t want to leave his son, who was barely out of toddlerhood, so he promised to finish it and she took him back. But things changed. Howard was miserable for weeks, working late and hardly saying aword, and the irony was that he never saw Daniel anyway. They fell into a pattern. He went to work and she brought up their son. Laura was used to loneliness. Her childhood had been an endless string of nannies as her mother went to parties and her father was at work. She was an only child—it had been too inconvenient for her parents to have any more. Laura had longed for a relationship with her mother, but it never came, and both her parents were now long dead. Determined that Daniel wouldn’t feel as abandoned as she had, she buried the hurt over Howard’s affair into positive things for her son: clubs, holidays, friends. Their relationship grew strong and Howard started to feel left out. He found it even harder to be at home and worked even longer hours and the resentment grew. Because he felt sidelined, he became crueler to Laura, criticized her parenting when Daniel cried on the weekends at this man whom he didn’t recognize, who picked him up.
Then one evening, after Daniel had started university, Laura was at home while Howard went out for a drink.
“Just someone from the club,” he said.
It had harpooned her unexpectedly, when she was filling the kettle with water, a sudden, swift plunge to the heart and she dumped the kettle in the sink while she fought to breathe again. For she suddenly knew who someone from the club was. Marianne was back, now that their respective children had grown. And then she remembered he’d been out with someone from the club the week before. Before that, she couldn’t remember and panicked while she wracked her brain. After the revelation had subsided, she felt exhausted, beaten; she knew it was because those two were still in love. Gradually “golf” had spread to whole weekends and she saw him less and less. Occasionally she considered whether she should ask him for a divorce, but it didn’t seem to matter so much anymore. Even though she knew Howard was the cause of the loneliness, facing up to it, breaking them apart, would only make the wound open and raw. She’d always preferred to concentrate on other things. Daniel had been at the center of her life for so long, and now she was secretly thrilledwith the notion that he’d found someone special, someone she might be able to be friends with.
“Daniel’s out again tonight.”
“I assumed as much.”
“That’s the third night in a row.”
He still hadn’t looked up from the paper and let out a small laugh. “He’s a grown man.”
She suppressed her frustration. “Yes, of course. He’s with a girl.”
Finally Howard looked at her. “Good for him.”
