The Woman at Number 24 Read online

  ‘Plus . . .’ Tom put his face close to hers, examining her. ‘You love it.’

  ‘Guilty as charged.’ In a doll’s house, people could be scooped up and set down. No fuss. No divorce. All cosy and hygienic and pain-free. ‘Most grown women miss their dolls, deep down.’

  ‘I bet you were a cute kid.’

  That veered perilously near to one of those giveaways women recognise, the ones that say ‘I like you’.

  Her confusion was contagious. Tom stammered, ‘But then all kids are cute.’

  Leo said, ‘Not a word a child psychologist uses, eh, Sarah? Cute.’ He stood at her shoulder, Teacher’s Pet.

  ‘Are you two strong chaps going to carry this upstairs, or do Sarah and I have to do it?’ Mavis flexed a puny arm.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ said Leo. ‘On my own.’

  ‘Your back . . .’ cautioned Sarah. He’d once spent a week in bed after bending to pick up an olive that fell out of his Martini.

  ‘Let me,’ said Tom.

  ‘You’re not needed,’ said Leo.

  Tom’s expression glitched.

  ‘Why not do it together?’ suggested Sarah.

  Leo and Tom confronted each other over the chair, the hallway crackling with their antipathy. Sarah was the root of their rivalry; Leo had a proprietary she-was-mine-once-mate reaction to a male on his territory, and Tom was acting out his disapproval of Leo’s behaviour.

  She liked it more than she should have done.

  ‘Left side up a bit, old man,’ said Tom.

  ‘Careful you don’t break a nail, Meryl Streep,’ said Leo.

  ‘Back up, back up!’

  ‘You’re dropping it!’

  Sarah followed the chair on its cumbersome journey towards the top of the house. Leo huffed, Tom groaned, and both believed they were doing the lion’s share of the work.

  ‘If you’d just—’ gasped Tom.

  ‘Why can’t you bloody—’ grunted Leo.

  Outside Flat A, the air foggy with testosterone, Sarah thanked them both.

  ‘No problem.’ Tom tried to look as if he wasn’t out of breath. ‘I’m off to look on eBay myself. Jane and I need a cheapie stand-in until some fancy armchair she’s ordered turns up.’

  ‘Have this!’ said Sarah. ‘It smells a bit, but it’s free.’

  ‘What a sales pitch. Are you sure?’ Tom looked at Sarah closer, making her wonder if he stared at everybody that way; some people’s faces are built to flirt.

  ‘I’m sure.’ Bodies are their own bosses; while Sarah’s mind rebuked Tom for straying over a line, her body buzzed with the static of sexual attraction. There was little point to her body’s insistence; as if wrapped in crime scene tape, Tom was firmly off-limits. Marriage vows were sacred to a woman whose own echoed pointlessly.

  Leo watched Tom heave the chair downstairs, arms folded, no intention of helping this time. Turning to Sarah, he said, ‘I can give you an hour at lunchtime, darling.’

  ‘That’s big of you.’

  Sailing past her into the flat, Leo didn’t register her tone. ‘Did you pick up the paint?’

  It would be simple to step into the familiar dance; Leo calling the tune and Sarah waltzing, always backwards, always in step. ‘How do you mean you can give me an hour?’ A throb beat in Sarah’s temple.

  ‘I meant, um . . .’ Leo shook his head. ‘What do you think I meant, silly? I meant we’ll have an hour while Helena’s at Pilates.’

  Sarah sensed Leo working out his next move, as if this was a game of chess. Does he feel this as keenly as I do? It was dangerous to be the only one playing for high stakes. ‘We don’t need to sneak around any more.’

  ‘Sneaking? Let’s not call it that. But, believe me, Helena wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘Helena understands perfectly. I told her.’

  ‘You . . . ? Right. O . . . K . . .’ Leo’s sangfroid slipped. ‘Why on earth did you do that, darling?’ He seemed genuinely intrigued and a little disappointed but not in the least annoyed.

  ‘Didn’t Helena mention our conversation?’

  ‘Not a dicky bird.’ Leo looked at the floor. Schoolboyish body language was a refuge of his when cornered.

  Sarah took a deep breath. Despite witnessing at close hand her mother’s disastrous love life, Sarah had followed her advice about Leo. She’d let him believe he was ‘in charge’, which meant Sarah had never stood up to him, even when he began to peel away from her. The weekends away ‘for work’ had gone unchallenged; his explanation about the perfume on his skin had been accepted. It was time to assert herself. ‘Helena reckons you’re only helping me to get me out of here quicker. Then you’ll buy the flat pretending to be somebody else and turn the top two floors into a penthouse.’ She didn’t mention the nursery. She couldn’t.

  ‘I’m terribly underhand, aren’t I?’ said Leo. ‘Come on, darling, see the funny side. Am I that Machiavellian? That’s a bloody long game to play.’ Leo leaned against the wall, amused. ‘Am I or am I not the most impatient, laziest slob you’ve ever met? That’s an exact quote, by the way. From a certain Ms Sarah Lynch.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with the price of fish?’ Sarah knew Leo’s modus operandi. The genial ‘who-me?’ The softening-up of his accuser. The finale where she ended up apologising. ‘I’m not one of your customers, Leo. You can’t soft-soap me.’

  ‘Anybody who comes to the Old Church takes away satisfaction as part of the package.’

  He was wounded. Leo was proud of the emporium. Sarah was framing the word ‘Sorry’ when she realised he’d almost managed to invade the moral high ground. ‘Are you or you not planning to buy this flat, Leo?’

  ‘Look, darling, I’m here with you because this is where I want to be. I don’t scheme and plot. I’m a pleasure baby, not bloody Napoleon.’

  Put like that it was funny. Sarah wanted to see the joke; if she laid down her cudgel they’d have a carefree lunch hour painting together, the radio playing, memories being disinterred and polished. Then, after he left, she could spend a further hour staring into space at St Chad’s reception desk as she analysed the declaration he’d just made about wanting to be there. With me.

  As if her mother was standing in the room with them, Sarah heard her shriek, exasperated, ‘For god’s sake let him win!’

  ‘But, Leo,’ began Sarah.

  His shoulders sank. ‘But what? Darling, we have so little time. Is it yes or no?’

  Sarah wavered. Was Helena playing her? The manipulative monster she described would hardly wait a whole year, paying half the mortgage for most of that time. Leo had been patient. ‘But,’ she repeated, unable to let it go, ‘how can I believe you when you lied to me before about Helena?’

  ‘Jesus,’ muttered Leo, irritation gaining the upper hand over good humour.

  ‘Be honest with me, Leo. Are you shooing me out of the house so your wife can fill my flat with murals and . . . and . . . and . . .’

  ‘Radiator covers,’ suggested Leo. ‘She likes those.’

  ‘Don’t make me laugh when I’m telling you off!’

  ‘Sorry, Miss. Look, think about it, silly. Why would Helena let you refurbish the flat and then buy it? She goes through a property like Attila the Hun. She strips buildings back to the beams and starts again.’

  ‘She said she wanted to make an offer right after the divorce but you said it was inappropriate.’

  ‘She’s teasing you. Helena wouldn’t back off because of a little thing like feelings.’ Leo pushed away from the wall, agitated. ‘Isn’t it enough that I’m here, that you’re here, that this is . . .’ Leo searched for the bon mot until he spat, ‘fun?’

  ‘It’s not much fun right now.’

  ‘And whose fault is that?’

  That was one of Leo’s catchphrases. ‘No, no, no,’ said Sarah. ‘You don’t get to blame me. You pinned the end of our marriage on me, when it was you who bludgeoned it to death.’

  ‘Your running off to Smith every five minutes didn’t e
xactly help matters.’

  ‘Did you ever, once, try and understand about Smith? Was that too much to ask?’

  His blather muted, Leo groused, ‘Oh God, this again. If you want, we can, you know, talk about Smith.’ Leo was diffident, as if offering a kidney he hoped nobody needed. ‘If you like.’

  ‘I do like.’ Sarah noted how his face dropped. ‘Why didn’t you cut me some slack after Smith’s diagnosis?’

  ‘Smith was S.E.P., darling. Somebody else’s problem.’

  Illness frightened Leo. He believed even depression to be contagious. While Sarah was preoccupied with hospital waiting rooms and blood tests, Leo had turned towards the light pulsing from Helena, a floor below. Bright, healthy, alive.

  ‘Smith was my friend, so she was my problem. What about me? I was your wife. Was I S.E.P.?’

  The hinge of her marriage, the day so much changed, had started ordinarily enough. Sarah let herself into Smith’s flat – the key was always under the mat – and pulled the sitting-room curtains.

  ‘Christ, even by your standards this place is a mess.’ Tidying around Smith, who was under a blanket on the sofa, Sarah suggested a shower and dangled the promise of a bacon butty. ‘Come on, Smithy. Up and at ’em. You’ve had hangovers before.’

  That’s when she noticed that Smith was crying, knuckling her eyes as if trying to gouge them out.

  Smith never cried. The hard knocks she alluded to but never properly explained had cured her, she said, of crying. Now the backdated tears arrived all at once.

  ‘Shush, no, shush.’ Alarmed, Sarah sat beside her friend, smoothing back hair which, that week, was pastel blue.

  ‘I haven’t got a hangover,’ hiccupped Smith.

  She looked wild, her eyes pressed into her pale face like drawing pins. Sarah couldn’t persuade her from the foetus position. ‘You’re scaring me,’ she said. She felt on the brink of something, some new place she wouldn’t much like. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘I saw a specialist. Yesterday. I didn’t want to worry you.’

  ‘You’re worrying me now.’ Sarah was startled by the volcano of feeling.

  ‘I have a brain tumour,’ said Smith, hands over her eyes.

  ‘We’ll get a second opinion,’ said Sarah automatically, fending it off, desperate to shove the words away. ‘This stuff is misdiagnosed all the time.’

  ‘This was the third opinion. It’s real, Sarah. I have a brain tumour.’ Smith wound her dry lips around the proper term. ‘It’s called an astrocytoma.’

  They sat side by side, immobilised. The room shimmered, like a stage set waiting to be struck. Smith lived in flux, the furniture constantly changing, the colour scheme morphing as she switched the blankets she flung around. All was cheap and disposable; an air of impermanence surrounded the slip of a girl with a different hairstyle for each day of the week and a conviction that striped tights went with everything.

  There was no point suggesting that a lone ranger like Smith involve her family. There was no ‘home’ for Smith apart from the fort she’d built with other people’s cast-offs. Even her hold on Flat A was tenuous, sublet from ‘this guy I had a thing with, not a big thing, just a, you know, thing,’ while he mooched around India.

  Sarah had often wondered how she’d lose Smith – there was something mercurial about her – but she’d never dreamt it would be like this. ‘Lean on me, OK?’ She took Smith’s limp hand. ‘Until you’re better again.’

  ‘Nah,’ Smith said. ‘There won’t be any getting better.’

  Sarah returned her attention to Leo, to the present. ‘There’s no need to talk.’ She heard him exhale, relieved. ‘We both know what happened with Smith. I was engrossed in St Chad’s and then I threw myself into looking after Smith. You were neglected.’ As if Leo was a puppy or a new baby.

  ‘True, I was neglected.’ Leo sounded saddened, but also glad that Sarah appreciated how very hard it had been for him. ‘But that’s no excuse. I never said I was a good man, darling.’

  The disrespect Sarah had repressed throughout their marriage surged through her. Why did Leo always accept his own shortcomings? Why hadn’t he rolled up his Savile Row sleeves and mucked in for once? It had been, literally, a matter of life and death. What’s more, Leo’s affair had started a full two months before Smith’s diagnosis. ‘You could have helped instead of turning away.’

  ‘If it had been anybody other than Smith . . .’

  ‘What? She didn’t deserve kindness?’ Smith’s loveless upbringing would have KO’ed silver-spoon Leo. ‘She did what she had to do to get by.’

  ‘Christ, you sound like bloody Peck, parroting what Smith said about herself. She was a taker, and you were a giver. She used you up, darling. There was nothing left for me.’

  ‘Do you ever listen to yourself? Where’s your heart, Leo?’

  ‘It used to be here.’ Leo looked around as if sizing up the flat. ‘Not any more.’ He stared Sarah in the face. ‘Not any more, darling.’

  ‘Why did I marry a man who uses endearments as weapons?’ Sarah stalked to the door and held it open with a flourish. ‘Thanks for all your help, darling.’

  ‘You’re throwing me out?’ Leo fluttered between disgust and laughter, unable to alight on either. When the door remained obstinately open and Sarah didn’t speak, he passed her and she closed the door firmly behind him.

  Chapter Nine

  Notting Hill, W11

  This calendar is FREE to valued customers!

  Saturday 25th June, 2016

  THERE IS ONLY ONE PRETTY CHILD IN THE WORLD, AND EVERY MOTHER HAS IT

  ‘Snap!’ Sarah pointed first at her own dungarees and then at Una’s dungarees.

  Una looked up at her severely, tiny mouth set in a pout. ‘You don’t seem to think so, but I assure you I am funny,’ said Sarah. ‘We’ll be about an hour,’ she told Lisa, adding a reassuring, ‘We won’t go far, just the garden for now.’ The woman looked apprehensive, as if she was handing over a hostage.

  ‘Up we go.’ Sarah led Una up the three steps from the yard to the lawn. Once an emblem of neglect, the garden, primped and tidied, was now a bright star, dragging the residents into its gravity. ‘There’s Tom!’

  ‘Una!’ crooned Tom, pleased to see her.

  The child looked to Sarah for approval and dashed to Tom, who kneeled down to greet her.

  Giving in to an impulse she should have ignored, Sarah glanced up at the roof terrace. Leo liked to linger there over a coffee before setting off for the Old Church, which opened later on Saturdays. Rewarded with a view of his disappearing back, Sarah knew he’d gone inside to avoid her. She turned to Tom. ‘What are you all ponced up for?’

  ‘Audition.’ The crumpled pale linen suit had a hint of the roaring twenties about it, bringing out the chestnut in Tom’s hair and accentuating his rower’s shoulders. ‘And by ponced up I assume you mean stunningly handsome, yeah?’

  This glamour was a revelation, as if Tom kept an alternative, seductive self in a drawer. He sent a razor-sharp charge through Sarah, who covered up her quickened breathing with a question. ‘What’s the role? A biggie?’

  ‘A huge-ie. The Beeb are adapting Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh.’

  ‘I did it for A-level.’ The outfit made sense now; Waugh’s Bright Young Things of the nineteen twenties lounged around in linen when they weren’t shimmying in tuxedos. ‘Which part are you up for?’

  ‘Adam Fenwick-Symes.’ Tom pulled in his chin. ‘Yeah, I know,’ he said, as Sarah’s eyes widened. ‘The lead. I won’t get it. Will I, Una?’

  Sarah would have to let Tom in on the golden rule: no questions! ‘I bet you a tenner you get it.’

  ‘Never has your money been so safe,’ laughed Tom. ‘It must be a mistake, I hardly ever get a crack at a telly gig, and if I do, it’s always “Best Friend of Hero” never actual “Hero”. My last audition went so badly I had an out-of-body experience.’

  ‘If Jane was here she’d spank you for that attitude.’


  ‘Well she’s not, so . . . ?’

  ‘I’m not going to spank you, Tom. Where is Jane?’ Even though Tom’s flirting was harmless, Sarah felt the need to draw a firm line in the sand; one extra-marital imbroglio was plenty.

  ‘On her way back from Suffolk. The client’s being, apparently, a total utter freaking dickhead.’

  ‘That’s our Janey,’ said Sarah. ‘What’s Una so interested in over there?’ She saw them then, their flamboyant radiant heads on sturdy stalks. ‘You planted sunflowers to replace the ones that died.’

  ‘Una can help me look after them. If she likes.’

  The child liked, that was clear. Tom was already a hero in this garden; Una was smitten. She wandered ahead of Tom and Sarah, making a slow tour. They travelled at Una’s pace, allowing her time to peer closely at minutiae.

  ‘She’s very into ants,’ said Tom. ‘Is this . . . are we in a session?’

  ‘Yes.’ Sarah kept her voice low; those little bat ears of Una’s picked up more than adults realised. ‘It’ll feel like play. The key is for Una to relax, for us to interact gently. Una needs a safe space with no pressure to talk. A place where, if she decides to say something, she won’t be judged.’

  Una examined every flower, every fallen leaf, every miscreant mushroom that pushed through the grass.

  ‘I saw Graham the other day. It’s obvious he’s already living with the new woman in his life . . .’ Sarah left the dots for Tom to join.

  It took a moment. ‘I see. We know that Lisa interrogates Una after she visits Graham . . .’

  ‘And Una knows that Lisa will kick off if she tells her about the cohabitation.’

  ‘Long word,’ said Tom. ‘Impressive.’ He looked tenderly at Una. ‘Poor kid. She shut up rather than make matters worse. That’s a lot of responsibility for a six-year-old.’

  Sarah was impressed. Thoughtful, kind Tom got it.

  ‘Are you OK?’ asked Tom abruptly. ‘The weather in your eyes has changed. As if something’s on your mind.’

  Sarah fibbed into that honest, open, concerned face; she couldn’t admit to being tied up in knots about Leo. ‘I’m fine.’

  Her fractious goodbye to Leo squatted in her mind like a toad. They’d been getting somewhere and she’d shattered their momentum.