The Girlfriend Read online

  He enjoyed watching her, unsure of how to take him. No doubt most people who came in here were stuffed with the importance of how a property should be, how it should rightfully fit their needs. They probably put great energy and effort into finding the perfect place, something that seemed to Daniel a colossal waste of time. The quicker he got it sorted, the better. ‘And the others.’

  ‘In a hurry?’

  ‘I should imagine for the price they’re all pretty nice? How much are they, anyway?’

  ‘These particular properties range from two and a half to four million.’

  ‘Wow.’

  ‘And yes, they’re exceptional.’

  ‘There you are, then. I need somewhere to live, and I’m sure I’d be extremely fortunate to live in any of those you’ve selected. So, shall we go and take a look?’

  Her hands fluttered over the screen. ‘I need to make appointments.’

  ‘Later today, then?’ He smiled. ‘I’m sure I’ll be your easiest client. I’ll have one picked by teatime. It is you showing me around, isn’t it?’

  She flicked her eyes across him, reassuring herself she hadn’t just encountered a psycho. ‘Yes,’ she said firmly, ‘it is.’

  This time, he was smarter, she noticed. He’d changed since he’d walked into her office this morning, into a pair of navy chinos and a light blue shirt. So far he’d followed her obediently around the first-floor apartment with little comment. She led him out of the living room. ‘As you can see, there are wooden floors throughout, and one of the benefits of this property is, of course, the hallway.’

  He gazed up and down. ‘What’s so special about it?’

  ‘It’s not so much that it’s special. It’s the fact it’s there.’

  He wondered in what world a hallway was considered a perk when you were paying £2.5 million, but didn’t want to offend her by saying so, and he realized he was guilty by association. He was the one looking around it, after all.

  ‘And this is the living room,’ she said, indicating through a doorway.

  He peered in. ‘Nice sofa. Yellow.’

  ‘Lemon,’ she corrected. ‘Of course, these furnishings will be removed on sale. The owner has left them to present the property.’

  ‘So it’s vacant?’

  ‘Yes. And there’s no chain.’

  ‘Did the owner not want the sofa at his or her new place?’

  Bemused, she looked at him. ‘I should imagine . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They bought new.’

  He smiled and followed her along the covetable hallway, glancing down to see if there was anything he might be missing, but then decided to concentrate on Cherry instead. He liked the way she walked, with purpose, as if she cared about where she was going and the reason for getting there. He had a feeling she might extend this determination to other parts of her life and he found himself wanting to know more about what they might be. Just then she turned and caught him staring at her. She stopped and folded her arms.

  ‘The kitchen is in there.’ She pointed and it was obvious he was meant to go first.

  ‘Sorry. I wasn’t staring at your bum.’

  She raised her eyebrows at his outspokenness. ‘Are you really interested in this flat?’ As much as there was a certain charm about this man, she couldn’t bear time-wasters. And she had a pretty good eye for spotting them, having been one herself, although that was justified as it was a means to an end.

  ‘Yes,’ he said quickly, wanting to reassure her. ‘I’ll take it!’

  ‘But we haven’t seen the others.’

  ‘This is the cheapest of the ones you have available, right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why pay more? Even this seems . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Obscene?’

  She looked at him.

  ‘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’s 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 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; the others he had been interested in, they were supposed to have seen in the 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 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 vendor wouldn’t change them before sale. 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.

  THREE

  Saturday 7 June

  Laura sat in her usual seat, at right angles 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 sprawled out on a lounger, she under the giant umbrella, he answering her questions with eyes closed against the sun, laughing at her enthusiasm to know everything about Cherry, she taking 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, an awkward look on his face.

  ‘I meant to say . . .’

  She turned back, a smile on her lips.

  ‘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 and suddenly felt an overwhelming irritation with it and the bizarre way in which she and Howard sat, clutching the end as if it were a sinking ship, 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, and he was reading the day’s Telegraph, 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 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, but 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 cleaner’s and left the receipts on the kitchen worktop. She’d seen them at breakfast. Howard had already left for work, and Laura knew with 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 were 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 her. She was married too, though, with young children and wasn’t prepared to split up the family. Laura considered leaving him – she had some money so 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 a word, 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 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 by doing positive things for him: 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 crueller to Laura, criticizing her parenting when Daniel cried at the weekends at this man 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’d told her before he left.

  It had harpooned her unexpectedly, when she was filling the kettle with water, a sudden, swift plunge to the heart, and she had 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 previous week. Before that, she couldn’t remember and panicked while she wracked her brains. After the shock had subsided, she felt exhausted, beaten, and she knew it was because they 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 her 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 centre of her life for so long, and now she was secretly thrilled with the notion that he’d found someone special, someone with whom she might be able to be friends.

  ‘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.’

  She smiled. ‘I think he’s smitten. They only met three days ago. And he’s seen her every night since.’

  ‘What’s your point?’

  ‘Oh, come on, Howard. Don’t you want to know who this girl is who’s swept him off his feet?’

  ‘You obviously do.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll text him.’

  ‘Don’t you dare,’ he whip-cracked.

  Hurt, she paused with the fork midway to her mouth. ‘I’m joking.’

  ‘Leave him alone. Just because for the first time in his life you don’t know every detail. Don’t interfere.’

  ‘I’m not interfering,’ she said quietly, and suddenly wanted to leave the room. She put her napkin down on the table and got up. She was about to take her plate to the kitchen when—

  ‘You’re obsessive’ – it was sudden, blunt – ‘possessive.’

  She stopped dead.

  Neither of them said anything for a moment; then he got up from the table and left.

  Laura stood there, her plate in her hand. Tears pricked her eyes, not just at the shock of the accusation but because of the look he’d given her as he left. It was a look of deep, loathing resentment. She sat for a moment and then, as if to stop his words settling on her somehow, stood again quickly and walked into the kitchen. She knew better than to follow him. He’d gone to the den, and anyway, she didn’t feel like confronting him, wasn’t in the mood for an argument.

  The plate clattered on the counter, and then the anger and indignation at what he’d said came out. He was the one who had made himself absent all those years. What did he know about the mammoth job required to bring up a child? The all-encompassing care when they were tiny, the lack of sleep, the wiping of cheeks, hands, bums, tables, high chairs – wipe, wipe, wipe. The inability to go to the toilet by yourself, the absolute knowledge that one hug from you would soothe the bumps and bruises, and those hugs always had to be available, the constant reverse psychology/humour/diversion tactics required to get through an average day with a toddler. He’d never had to deal with, or suffer, the heart-rending tears when Daniel didn’t want to go to nursery or try to work out why, when his four-year-old reasoning couldn’t explain, he lacked the confidence to make friends. He hadn’t had to make the decisions over sports, clubs and parties, or work out how to encourage independence without making him feel he was unsupported, or soothe the night terrors after the sudden death of his grandfather from a heart attack. What did he know about any of this? She felt a rage at his appalling short-sightedness, and then, pouring herself a glass of wine, the anger subsided. Nobody knew any of this, nobody but a mother.

  She picked up her wine and found her book by the fridge and took them into the darkening garden. The jasmine was beautifully pungent, its hundreds of tiny white star-like flowers just breaking out now June had arrived. She lit the citronella candles and soon the moths came to investigate. As she sat in the swing seat, she let her mind drift. It was funny thinking back – it had been practically just her and Daniel for years, and now he was on the verge of moving out permanently. She was suddenly reminded of something he used to say when he was three. He’d pretend to be a puppy and bound around her.

  ‘Woof!’ he’d say. ‘Do you like him?’

  ‘He’s gorgeous.’

  ‘You can keep him if you want.’

  ‘Can I?’

  ‘You can keep him forever.’ And he’d throw his arms around her neck tightly.

  The cat came mewing pitifully, his tail like a toilet brush, and she saw a fox sniffing around the large opaque window in the middle of the lawn that formed part of the ceiling of the subterranean pool room. Moses jumped onto her lap and stood there, still meowing and waiting for salvation. She’d originally got him for Daniel when he was nine, to teach him about looking after pets. He was a small silver-grey Burmese and she’d ended up growing quite fond of him. Picking up a pebble, she threw it in the direction of the fox; she disliked them, was wary of their c
apabilities and lack of boundaries. Recently she’d heard a distraught, incredulous woman call into a radio breakfast show talking about how a fox had brazenly walked in through the open back door and climbed into her baby’s cot in the middle of the day. She shuddered. If that had been Daniel when he was small, she would have probably smashed its head against the patio.

  Three nights in a row, she thought with a smile. Who sees someone three nights in a row from the off? What did this girl have that was so special? As she mused about Cherry, she thought about another girl, a girl a tiny bit older than Daniel. Rose was Laura’s firstborn. She’d been the perfect baby, eating and sleeping right on schedule from day one. Which was why it had been so unusual when, at only a few days old, she’d had difficulty waking her for a feed. When it happened again three hours later, Laura was worried enough to take her to the doctor. He took one look at her and she was rushed to hospital. She was diagnosed with group B streptococcus, contracted from undetected bacteria in the birth canal. After twenty-four hours, the doctors told them Rose was going to die, and two hours later, she did, in her arms. She was exactly seven days old.

  The guilt had almost broken her, and their marriage. Laura was consumed with the thought of whether Rose would have survived if she’d gone to the doctor’s when she’d slept through her first feed. The thing that saved them both was her getting pregnant again. Ten months later, when Daniel was born, Laura had vowed to whichever presence might be listening that she’d devote her life to this tiny creature and never let anything happen to him if in return he could be kept safe.

  The cat lowered itself onto her soft thighs, half closing his eyes in relief at the fox’s disappearance, and Laura stroked his fur. He watched the demented moths with occasional darting eyes, but was either too lazy or tired to actually do anything about them. As Laura swung gently in the seat, she thought fondly of this girl she’d not yet met, this girl who was the same age her own daughter would have been.

  FOUR

  Saturday 7 June