The Woman at Number 24 Page 4

  A suspicion flared early on, that Leo preferred the beginnings of things, but he was sexy, he was loving, and he would protect her from her mother. After six years of marriage – and a slight, inevitable dulling of passion – Leo began an affair with Helena.

  ‘Why?’ sobbed Sarah when she found a sext on his phone.

  ‘You’ve changed,’ shouted Leo. ‘You’re never here, Sarah! When I get back from the Old Church, you’re either at that bloody clinic or downstairs doing God knows what with . . .’ He hadn’t needed to supply the name. They’d both known he was talking about Smith.

  By that time, Leo and Helena had been sleeping together for three months. Once the first shock had subsided, the aftershocks delivered more nasty surprises. It was a terrible blow to her confidence, not only as a woman but as a psychologist: Sarah wondered bleakly how on earth she could expect to connect with troubled children when she hadn’t even noticed the man she knew best in the world was being unfaithful to her.

  The sandpaper was idle in Sarah’s hand. Confucius was right again; it was bloody hard work standing still. These excursions into the past exhausted her, but her mind circled the endless conundrum: how does such a bond dissolve? Her marriage had been strong and vigorous, like an oak. But even oaks topple, and this one had crushed Flat A.

  With sarcastic timing, the sound of a popping cork ricocheted up from the flat below.

  Sarah froze at the sound of footsteps thundering up the stairs. She threw down the sandpaper and pushed at her hair, rearranging her features as Leo banged on the door.

  Framed in the doorway, Leo was too real for Sarah to take in. They’d passed on the stairs, pretended not to see each other in the street, but they hadn’t spoken since his wedding day.

  ‘Leo,’ she said, hoping it sounded indifferent, knowing it sounded excited.

  ‘Isn’t it time,’ said Leo, his head on one side, his face pleated into a poignant smile, ‘we kissed and made up?’

  It was so close to the storyboard of her nightly dreams that Sarah was lost for words.

  Stepping into view, Helena said, ‘He’s right. Have a glass of fizzy-pops.’ She brandished a bottle. ‘Friends?’ she said, her lipstick too glossy, her voice too sickly.

  ‘I’ve gone off champagne,’ managed Sarah.

  ‘Are you demurring, Lynch?’ Leo looked directly at her; this hadn’t happened since Helena happened.

  It was a rush, like a shot of tequila. He was playful, sunny. Leo had never looked so tall, so rumpled and earthy. She missed him with every lonely inch of her neglected body.

  ‘Because,’ Leo went on, ‘when you demur, I pooh-pooh.’ He barged in and the flat was suddenly alive and sparkling. Helena followed, dragging Sarah by the hand.

  Up close, Helena was unlikely. Nobody could stroll around amongst mere mortals with skin that creamy, décolletage that mountainous, hair that sleek. Clothes, however minimal, seemed extraneous: she was designed to be naked, her tanned, polished, waxed and buffed body as smoothly perfect as a doll’s. This happy friendliness was not her usual style; before the affair, Helena had ignored Sarah. After it, she’d ignored her even harder. ‘The things I’d do with this place!’ She looked around, a firework in a coal mine, at the mess. ‘You know my apartment’s doubled in price?’

  Sarah thought she must be imagining it, but no, Leo was smirking at her over his wife’s head. They used to laugh about their pretentious new neighbour, wincing when she called her flat an ‘apartment’.

  Accepting the booze she didn’t want, Sarah’s fingers touched Leo’s as he handed her a glass. She wondered if he noticed. ‘What are we celebrating?’

  ‘Life,’ said Leo, with a collaborative look at Helena that sliced through Sarah like cheese wire. ‘It’s too short to waste on bad feeling. We all said things we regret. Can we put it behind us?’

  Sarah felt railroaded – Leo was downsizing their divorce to a tiff – but she also felt flattered. Yes, that fluttery feeling in her chest was elation that Leo had noticed her again. That he’d been moved enough by memories of their relationship to mount the stairs and make a speech. ‘Why not?’ She raised her glass awkwardly.

  ‘You angel,’ said Leo.

  Sarah knew his every look. He was admiring her. It was a long time since Sarah had been admired.

  It was clear that Helena was oblivious to the ley lines that ran between the exes. Swinging her hair – she did this often enough for it to count as a hobby – she’d reached the end of her attention span. ‘So, buddy.’ She clicked her fingers at Leo. ‘Let’s grab a cab and get to town.’ She turned towards Sarah. ‘We’re having supper at Claridge’s.’

  ‘Ooh,’ said Sarah dutifully.

  Leo’s eyes opened wide and the boyish happiness of his expression threw Sarah down a time tunnel. When he woke up in their bed with that expression on his face it meant that by lunchtime they’d be on a ferry to France, or at the top of the Shard, or making love under a tree beside an ignored picnic. ‘Come with us, darling!’

  ‘I’m hardly dressed for it.’ Sarah looked down at her overalls.

  ‘You used to love surprises,’ he said sadly, as if she was dead.

  Helena said nothing, but she didn’t have to; the daggers that flew from her eyes did all the talking.

  ‘No? Fine.’ Leo gave in, crestfallen. He was optimum Leo today, bubbling over with wicked fun, hair flopping, big hands never still. ‘Then at least, please, just for me, will you girls get together for a coffee at some point?’

  The ‘girls’ shuffled their feet and made small, negative noises, but Leo was a steamroller. Throwing an arm around each of them, he pulled them together like nervy cats. ‘My two favourite women in the world should be chums.’

  Close up, Helena’s perfume made Sarah want to sneeze.

  ‘Come on!’ Leo shook them both, his hand a branding iron on Sarah’s shoulder. It was so long since he’d laid hands on her. ‘Why not meet for a coffee and a moan about me?’

  Bridling, Sarah was insulted that Helena also bridled. It was, after all, Helena who’d stolen Sarah’s man, not the other way around. A perverse impulse made Sarah say, ‘I could do any day this week.’

  ‘This week’s no good for me,’ said Helena, with that slight trace of accent Sarah had never pinned down. ‘I’m so busy.’ She fluttered her hands: ‘Busy, busy, busy!’

  ‘I’m not busy at all,’ said Sarah, opting out of the one-upwomanship.

  ‘I dunno,’ said Helena reluctantly. ‘Next Thursday?’

  ‘That’s a date!’ Leo, at least, was happy.

  ‘Listen, baby, we really should get going.’ Helena’s mood, always mercurial, had turned. The coo was an order.

  ‘Dash down to the flat and fetch your bag, angel, and I’ll meet you on the steps.’

  Sarah had dreamed of being alone with Leo, but now she was shy of the man she’d shared a bed with for seven years. She recalled how they’d nod off spooning, but always wake up face to face.

  As if sensing she needed space, Leo stepped away from Sarah. Gently he said, ‘I’m sorry about the solicitor’s letter. That was . . .’

  It was cowardly, but Sarah had let Leo off the hook by blaming Helena for the ultimatum. ‘You should have just come up and talked about it.’

  ‘But we weren’t talking. The wedding seemed to change everything.’

  ‘Well, duh,’ said Sarah.

  On headed notepaper, Leo’s lawyer had informed Sarah that his client had been ‘most patient’, but wasn’t prepared to wait any longer for the jointly owned marital home to be liquidated. In stilted legal language it recapped what Sarah knew only too well.

  At the time of the break-up, Leo had wanted to sell up right away. Sarah had asked for time to acclimatise. When that was up, she talked Leo into agreeing that the flat would sell for far more if she finished all the improvements they’d started together. Leo had given her until the decree nisi, coming up with half the mortgage each month.

  To assuage his guilt, Sarah ha
d thought. At the wedding she told Leo she still needed time. ‘I’ll pay the whole mortgage from now on,’ she’d promised.

  ‘Our client,’ said the letter, ‘insists that you have the flat ready for sale by 31st August this year. If you do not meet this target date, then Mr Harrison will arrange for the property to be professionally refurbished.’

  Sarah asked, ‘Would you really send in builders if I’m not finished?’

  ‘What else can I do? It’s been a year. I need my investment back.’

  Me too, thought Sarah, although it wasn’t the money she needed. It was the time, the happiness, the love. ‘We always said we’d do this place ourselves.’

  ‘A lot’s changed since then.’ Leo was disappointed in Sarah, like a kindly headmaster with her report in his hand. ‘It shouldn’t take this long.’ He shook his head. ‘Helena would’ve flipped the place by now.’

  ‘She does it for a living.’ Sarah was impressed; Leo had found a new way to hurt her. Being compared to the woman who’s usurped your throne is never fun. ‘I’m doing it on my own, remember.’

  ‘Get a man in,’ said Leo.

  ‘I’m skint.’ Paying twice as much mortgage saw to that. Sarah’s savings were vanishing. ‘Besides, I don’t want my last few weeks at Merrion Road spoiled by whistling workmen.’

  ‘One of us has to go, Sarah. You do see that, don’t you?’

  When she was thinking straight, Sarah saw it perfectly. ‘I suppose it is a bit seventies sitcom.’

  ‘You can’t expect Helena to move out. That flat’s her showcase.’

  The assumption that Sarah should defer to Helena made her head swim. Had he forgotten how they’d laughed at the pretentious captions when Helena’s jewel-box restoration of Flat B – all concealed doors and silk rugs – was featured in their local magazine? ‘Does Helena still have that oh-so-wittily lopsided chandelier?’

  Leo didn’t recognise the quote. ‘The crazy thing is . . .’ He lowered his voice. ‘I’ll miss you like crazy.’

  Sarah didn’t know what to say, so she said nothing.

  ‘Listen.’ Leo swallowed. ‘Let me help.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Prepping. Painting. Tearing down those cabinets you hate. Whatever you need.’

  ‘Thanks but no thanks, Leo.’ It was so hard not to call him ‘darling’.

  ‘You need to finish the flat for the sake of up here.’ Leo tapped her head lightly, something he’d done when they were married. It had irritated her then, but now it was the most loving touch she’d felt in an age. ‘I feel responsible. After all, I kind of left you in the lurch.’

  ‘Kind of?’

  Leo had moved closer. His nearness had a narcotic effect. Sarah felt her gates clang open, her heart unfold. ‘Let me. It would help me too. Because, well, you’re not the only one hurting. Let me make it up to you a little. Let me . . .’ His green eyes, always mesmeric, were near. Too near, some might say. One of the ones who might say that was Sarah. ‘Let me be close to you for a couple of hours now and then. Please.’

  The front door, left open by Helena, delivered Mavis to them, her dirty white hair a chrysanthemum about her disapproving face. ‘Hmm. Am I interrupting something?’

  ‘No,’ said Sarah and Leo in unison, the spell broken.

  ‘Claridge’s beckons.’ Leo backed away. ‘How about tomorrow? About seven?’

  ‘No, I’ll be . . .’

  ‘You’ll be here, darling.’ Leo was pressing down on a smile. ‘And so shall I. Deal?’

  Sarah looked about her at the wasteland of paint pots and dust sheets. ‘Deal.’

  Mavis watched Sarah as Leo left. ‘That’s the face of a woman who’s made a pact with the devil.’

  ‘Bit dramatic,’ laughed Sarah.

  ‘Not at all. I know what I’m talking about.’

  ‘Can I help you, Mavis?’ Sarah needed her out of there, so she could reflect on the deal. And regret. And cancel.

  ‘Dinner, dear.’ Mavis was querulous, like an angry bird that had flown in and would surely break a window and poo on the curtains before it flew out again. ‘You invited me, remember?’

  Sarah played for time, looking blank, wondering what had possessed her to invite Mavis into her home. ‘Um . . . but . . .’ Sarah couldn’t find a polite way to say you shut the door in my face!

  Mavis had ironed one of her terrible dresses, a nylon number patterned with chevrons. She turned, with the slow mechanics of the elderly. ‘You’ve forgotten. I’ll go,’ she said.

  ‘No, hang on.’ Sarah reached out, took Mavis’s elbow, bony beneath the flammable sleeve. It was a long climb from the basement to the eaves, and an even longer climb down from the high horse that Mavis rode everywhere. ‘Dinner. Great idea.’

  The massive handbag clutched to Mavis’s chest contained a bottle of wine which she brusquely handed over, as if being mugged. ‘Are you decorating?’

  ‘Trying to!’ Sarah visualised the inside of her fridge as she swiftly improvised a table in the sitting room. Since the departure of Leo’s mahogany dining set she’d taken her meals on the sofa. ‘Let’s open the wine!’ Sarah glanced at the label. ‘Bloody hell,’ she said.

  ‘Is it all right?’ The voice was uncertain, Mavis reining in her customary growl.

  ‘It’s very much all right.’ Even to Sarah’s uneducated eyes, this was a choice wine, a bottle Leo might order when showing off. ‘Are you sure . . . ?’

  ‘Please, Sarah, open it if you wish. Just leave it if not.’ Mavis coughed and held a handkerchief – a proper, embroidered one, of the kind only seen in period dramas – to her lips. Staying the right side of rude was evidently a strain for her.

  The contents of the fridge were just as Sarah feared. As Confucius might put it, she who lives on takeaways has only odds and sods in the fridge.

  A dejected lump of Red Leicester; an onion past its prime; a lonely egg. She hovered, letting the fridge chill her perspiring face.

  Mavis was beside her, small as a child. ‘Let’s see . . .’ She reached in. ‘Welsh rarebit.’ Closing the fridge door, she said, ‘Sit,’ with a regal edge that brooked no disobedience.

  As Sarah sat in the window seat, Mavis cast about for a grater, and transformed the lurid orange cheese into a pile of shavings. ‘This is how my grandmother made it.’ Her arthritic hands moved surely.

  ‘Family recipes are best.’ Sarah’s own mother had passed down only the phone number for the local curry house. Leo had loved Sarah’s apple pie; the memory of their pastry initials entwined reminded her that she hadn’t cooked a decent meal since he left. ‘Did your sister like your Welsh rarebit?’

  The kitchen seemed to clench, as if the cupboards and crockery sensed the darkening of Mavis’s mood. For such a tiny person, she had a huge effect. Sarah quailed, gulping at her wine. This is what came of inviting predators to dinner.

  ‘You should know,’ said Mavis, without pausing in the massacre of the onion, ‘that I don’t wish, care, want . . .’ Her head wobbled, its white mass of burst mattress hair shivering as she struggled for the right word. ‘Look, child, never ask me about Zelda.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘My sister’s dead. Gone.’

  ‘I’m clumsy sometimes, Mavis.’

  ‘Yes.’ Mavis cracked an egg. ‘You are.’ She threw the shell into the bin.

  Because Sarah was humane, she took a deep breath and started again; because Sarah was scared of Mavis, she chose her words carefully. ‘That’s a funky way to separate the yolk from the white.’ Leaning over from the window seat, she set down a glass of wine for the chef. ‘I get it all over the worktop.’

  ‘You can freeze that white.’ Mavis put the little bowl aside. ‘It’ll come in handy for meringues.’

  ‘You’ve got me mixed up with somebody who makes meringues,’ smiled Sarah.

  ‘I haven’t made them myself for a while.’ Mavis mixed the cheese and onion and egg with a practised twirl of her wrist.

  It intrigued Sarah tha
t at some point in her past, Mavis had been moved to make meringues. Surely that was a speck of beauty? Only there if you looked hard. A woman who made meringues couldn’t be all bad.

  There was something different about Mavis. Sarah tried to pin it down. It wasn’t something extra, it was something missing.

  Smoke.

  The permanent nicotine fog that hugged Mavis as close as a lover was absent. ‘Have you given up smoking, Mavis? That can’t have been easy.’ Mavis chain-smoked, lighting one cigarette from the stub of the last one.

  ‘I didn’t like to smoke around Zelda while she was ill. I don’t feel the need to take it up again.’

  Mavis was cut off again, those shutters down. The question had been too personal. Sarah tried, ‘Peck’s a character, isn’t he?’

  ‘He’s a very demanding lodger.’ Mavis seasoned the mixture, then grappled with the grill. It was an old-fashioned eye-level model; Leo had gone into raptures over the bulky white 1960s cooker: now he lived with a kitchen so minimal it looked like a mortuary. ‘His feathers are falling out. Stress, according to the vet. I’m not sure what a cockatoo has to be stressed about.’

  ‘It’s not like he needs to fill in a tax return.’

  ‘Quite.’ Quaite. This was the longest Sarah had ever listened to Mavis; the old lady’s pronunciation was quaint around the edges. ‘Peck’s tablets are more expensive than caviar. Foil?’

  Puzzled for a moment, Sarah caught up and pointed. ‘Second drawer down.’

  ‘I do wish he wasn’t so foul-mouthed,’ said the woman who’d taught Peck the naughty words in the first place. ‘This bread’s past its best.’ Mavis chiselled out the jade dots, her hands free of rings, the knuckles red, the palms chafed.

  ‘Sorry about the rough-and-ready kitchen.’ Sarah watched Mavis tussle with the grill pan, half rising, unsure whether help would be welcomed or met with a rap on the knuckles. ‘My to-do list is longer than the bible.’

  ‘It’s no worse than my own home.’ Mavis glanced about her, seeming to like what she saw. Perhaps, like Sarah, she saw past the damp and the discoloured patches and the copper pipes that snaked across the kitchen walls. ‘So much light.’ She raised her face to the window, as if sunbathing. ‘Sometimes I feel like a mole down in the basement.’