The Woman at Number 24 Page 9

  ‘Because it is!’ Jane wouldn’t let her off the hook. ‘He’s somebody else’s husband now.’

  ‘We’re all moving on, like adults. Helena and I are having a coffee tomorrow.’

  Consternation broke out in the car.

  ‘You what?’ Jane went cockney with horror. ‘She nicked your man! Why have coffee with her?’

  ‘I want to, I . . .’ Sarah ran out of steam; she couldn’t sell such a lie.

  From the back seat, Tom asked, ‘Whose idea was it?’

  The silence was silver-tongued.

  ‘Leo’s,’ said the Royces in unison.

  ‘He didn’t realise what he was asking of me.’ They didn’t understand Leo. He was broad strokes, loud noises, but he meant well.

  ‘Either he didn’t realise,’ said Tom, ‘or he didn’t care. Either’s bad.’

  The growl of the handbrake put a full stop to the subject. ‘The ice creams are on you, Tom.’

  ‘As usual.’ Tom nipped out and held the door for Sarah. ‘Funky shoes,’ he said, pointing. ‘New?’

  ‘Yes.’ Sarah tapped the polka dot bows together. ‘My stylist chose them.’

  Chapter Seven

  Notting Hill, W11

  This calendar is FREE to valued customers!

  Thursday 23rd June, 2016

  DON’T FEAR THE ENEMY THAT ATTACKS YOU, FEAR THE FALSE FRIEND WHO EMBRACES YOU

  As Sarah pieced herself together to meet Helena, she allowed herself to admit how keenly she dreaded it.

  Trousers? Dress? Hair up, down, back, messy? She cursed Leo for marrying a woman whose style was eulogised in gossip columns.

  Opting out of a competition she couldn’t win, Sarah pulled on her jeans and took the letter’s advice: ‘be yourself because you’re more than good enough’.

  Just the way Sarah was that morning included a stain on her tee and a constellation of heat bumps on her collarbone, but Sarah was more or less at peace with herself. She was a woman-shaped woman, dressed for the sunshine, and sporting the same smudged eyeliner she’d learned to apply in the school loos.

  London perspired beyond St Chad’s revolving doors, the cracks in the pavements dry as ash. There was a scenic route to the main road, passing white mansions and bijou cottages, but Sarah opted for the other way to save time. She’d lumped her morning and afternoon tea break together, but that only gave her forty minutes. All life is a matter of choosing the various roads that diverge in the woods, and today Sarah chose the tarmac path through a housing estate.

  Low-rise, it had probably been a model development before British weather got hold of the concrete facings. British teenagers hadn’t done it any favours either; graffiti informed Sarah that ‘Annette is a slag’ and Manchester United were ‘king’. It was a village of sorts, and she sensed a community spirit beneath the dispirited raw materials; the small flats looked cosy.

  A baseball cap caught her eye. Or rather, the face beneath it. Graham looked cheesed off, his default setting, as he waited for somebody to catch up with him on a first-floor glass walkway, most of its glass cracked or absent.

  A dark-haired woman, skinny, eager, jogged after him.

  He had a type; the new girlfriend looked like a younger Lisa.

  Laden with shopping, they stopped by one of the doors and scrabbled for keys. Graham glanced down and caught Sarah’s eye.

  She waved, but didn’t break step. When Graham came to the edge of the balcony and called her name she suppressed a sigh. He was a soul Hoover, ever ready to sour the atmosphere.

  ‘You found me out, then,’ he called down to her, a raggedy Romeo to her reluctant Juliet.

  Sarah shielded her eyes, squinting up. ‘How’d you mean?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, so I’m living with my bird. Big deal.’

  Sarah held up her hands. ‘Sorry. What?’

  ‘Don’t tell her.’ Graham jabbed his finger. ‘Lisa’ll go apeshit.’

  ‘Why would I . . .’ The quickest way to end this surreal conversation was to acquiesce. ‘Sure. No problem.’

  ‘I mean it.’ Graham shook off the appeasing hand of the child woman.

  Feeling she’d indulged Graham’s paranoia enough, Sarah hurried on. Fear of Lisa’s wrath was understandable; his ex had an uninhibited vocabulary and uncanny aim with a shoe.

  The encounter gnawed at Sarah as she left the estate and crossed an invisible border into the land of delicatessens and frozen yoghurt purveyors and art galleries which sold ugly prints for more than Graham would earn this year.

  In the window seat of the organic farm shop cafe, Helena sat among carrier bags as if styled for a shoot. For Helena, being herself involved layers of make-up that made her face look nude, and a bandeau dress that, along with the dramatic sweep of glossy dark hair and polished olive skin, made Sarah think of business-class flights and white beaches.

  Before Helena noticed her, Sarah paused. She looked down at herself, wildly fearful that there’d be clues on her person to what she’d done the night before.

  There were no fingerprints on her skin; she and Leo hadn’t made contact. The radio burbling in the background, they’d manhandled the furniture out of the spare room and ripped up the hated carpet. Leo had tackled the more tenacious areas, ‘to save your hands’. Even so, she’d scratched her finger and he’d commiserated. One cup of tea later and he’d been on his way. It had been chaste, impeccable.

  So why do I feel like a hooker?

  Sarah and Leo were building something as they dismantled her flat. The rags of their rapport were being stitched back together; the pattern it made was pleasing to her eye.

  Helena looked up and smiled, putting aside her magazine.

  ‘Nice place,’ said Sarah dutifully, taking the seat opposite her at the wooden table.

  ‘I know,’ agreed Helena, taking credit for the cafe’s bright, spare interior. ‘They know me here.’

  ‘They don’t know me.’ Sarah had passed it by, wondering (a) how on earth a farm shop could stray so far from the sound of tractors and (b) how the food could be ‘locally sourced’: Notting Hill was short on actual hills.

  ‘The latte is to die for,’ said Helena.

  ‘I might try a croissant.’

  ‘They’re organic,’ said Helena. ‘And artisanal.’

  Sarah had no idea what that meant. ‘They probably grind the flour in the basement using locally sourced stones.’ Sarah motioned to the waitress. ‘And they’re baked by Booker Prize winning novelists.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ Helena looked both puzzled and pitying as if Sarah believed her own joke. She adjusted the neckline of her dress, which was doing its level best to deal with her breasts. All Helena’s clothes were as tight as corsetry. ‘I mean, it’s probably made by, like, proper bakers.’

  Realising that Helena had stayed home from school the day they covered irony, Sarah asked, ‘Will you join me? In a croissant? Not in one, just . . .’ There truly was no point making jokes around Helena.

  ‘I’m cutting out, like, carbs.’ Helena’s exotic accent combined with West London Trustafarian tics was peculiar.

  It was also alluring. Sarah, fastidiously fair, couldn’t deny Helena’s sex appeal. ‘Carbs are the best bits.’

  ‘My personal trainer would kill me.’

  ‘He works for you, not the other way round.’ Sarah didn’t understand slavish devotion to personal trainers, high priests of the new order. ‘A little of what you fancy does you good.’

  ‘But it’s never just a little.’ Helena eyed the jam that arrived with the croissant. ‘Is it?’

  ‘Thankfully, no.’ Sarah refused to be bowed. In the same way she scrolled past any hint of online body shaming bikini body nonsense, she refused to let puritans spoil her enjoyment of food. ‘Have you noticed the changes to the garden?’

  ‘It needs hard landscaping. Grey pebbles instead of the grass. Maybe a small water feature and some wind chimes. Very Zen. So soulful.’

  ‘Hmm. Nothing soulful about sunbathing on
pebbles.’ Sarah spread butter – local, organic, possibly made from angels’ breast milk – on a second croissant. It pained her to admit it, but the chic snack did taste better than standard coffee shop fare. As if the napkins and the pedigree of the waitress somehow elevated the food.

  ‘That chap, what’s his name, Tim, is really putting his back into it.’

  The casual tone was what poker players call a tell: So you fancy Tom, eh? ‘Tom, you mean.’

  ‘Yes, him. Married to that mannish woman.’

  ‘What makes you say Jane’s mannish?’

  ‘The hair. The walk. And oh dear, the clothes.’ Helena flashed her eyes and the black flicks she drew so expertly on her upper lids lifted like claws.

  ‘She’s my friend, so . . .’ Half an hour ago, Jane had raved over the phone, ‘You’re only meeting that rancid blow-up doll to please Leo. He walked out, Sarah! You don’t owe him a thing!’

  It had been tricky trying to explain without exposing the dubious heart of the matter: I’m doing what Leo wants so he’ll love me again.

  Technically, it was rude behaviour when Helena’s head tilted like a meerkat as she surveyed the social scene of the farm shop, but Sarah welcomed the break from laboured conversation. They had little to say to one another; their only common ground was Leo, and Sarah still found it hard to hear his name on those plumped lips.

  When the affair came to light, Sarah had asked, ‘Do you love her?’

  When Leo nodded, Sarah felt like a building left standing after everybody in it has died. Only the iron girders of pride held her up.

  ‘I want to be with her.’ Leo had had the decency to cry a little.

  ‘Not with me?’ Sarah whispered.

  ‘No, my dearest darling,’ he’d said sadly. ‘Not with you.’

  Contemplating the croissant crumbs on her plate as Helena mimed ‘Call me!’ at somebody, Sarah wondered why she’d behaved so graciously. She remembered her mother’s operatic hysterics when her father left, while his face gave nothing away. Perhaps her mother was right: I am more like him than her.

  ‘Is there something on my face?’ Sarah wiped her mouth self-consciously as Helena scrutinised her. It was the way Leo looked at antique tables when working out whether they were the real thing or clever fakes.

  ‘Your bones . . .’ said Helena, thoughtfully, ‘Not half bad, actually. A damson lip, a coral cheek and a teeny-tiny shot of Botox just here . . .’ Helena leaned over to tap the bridge of Sarah’s nose. ‘Plus, of course, a decent cut and blow-dry, and you’d be cute.’

  ‘Kittens are cute.’ Sarah didn’t share Helena’s passion for the surface of things, but that didn’t mean she was immune to her judgement. ‘Next to you,’ she said, forgetting to self-edit, ‘I feel like an elephant. An elephant with bad dress sense.’ It wasn’t just that pneumatic Helena was smaller, it was that she was so securely bound, so professionally finished, all her gestures Geisha-neat. ‘An elephant with a bad haircut. Let’s not forget the bad haircut.’

  ‘Silly.’ Helena was playful: compliments stoked her fire. ‘You only need to lose a stone or so.’

  ‘I don’t like diets. Food is food.’ There were no bad guys and good guys in Sarah’s fridge.

  ‘Sweetie, detox for one month and you’ll wave goodbye to that back fat.’

  ‘I like my back fat.’ This wasn’t entirely true – Sarah hadn’t known she even had back fat – but she stood, Canute-like, against the tide of self-hatred that washed over the children she treated. Seven-year year-olds who kneaded their own – gorgeous – tummies, saying ‘Yuk’, needed reinforcement that their cuddly young bodies were wonderful; instead popular culture set them up for lifelong warfare with their own skin. ‘Is back fat even a thing?’

  ‘Whatever, whatever.’ Helena dismissed such Amish nonsense. ‘Detoxing makes you feel fabulous.’

  Everything was fabulous in Helena’s world of gratuitous overstatement.

  ‘It’s only the toxins holding me together.’

  ‘You’ll thank me one day,’ said Helena. ‘Did you get my email about Mavis?’

  ‘About Mavis?’ Helena and Mavis – one perfumed, the other smelling of cockatoo – inhabited separate universes.

  ‘I’m trying to bring the tenants together,’ said Helena.

  Surprised that the thaw in number twenty-four had reached as far as Helena, Sarah said, ‘That’s nice. We’re already much more friendly than we used—’

  ‘I mean,’ interrupted Helena, ‘we need to get together and bully Mavis to improve her flat.’

  ‘Over my dead body will anybody bully Mavis.’ Since the soured farewell after their last dinner, the old lady had been invisible. Trying to make friends with Mavis, whose skill was for making enemies, was a matter of one step forward, two steps back.

  ‘Bullying is the wrong word. English is my second language. I mean “persuade”. If Mavis was to develop her apartment—’

  ‘Let me stop you right there,’ said Sarah, amused despite herself. ‘Mavis isn’t the developing kind. She hasn’t bought new curtains since God was a baby.’

  ‘The basement is dragging down the value of the whole house.’ Helena looked aggrieved; money was a religion with her. ‘If Mavis modernises Flat E we’ll all be in the money.’

  ‘We are all in the money.’ Notting Hill property appreciated at the speed of light. ‘Remember Mavis has lived at number twenty-four . . . forever.’

  ‘She’d be happy anywhere. As long as it was filthy.’ Helena laid a reassuring hand on Sarah’s. Her touch was cool, lizard-like. ‘I’m just brainstorming for now, seeing who agrees with me.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘The Royces will see my point. She’s in property, I believe.’

  Yes, but she has a heart. ‘Lisa’ll get on board,’ said Sarah. Lisa’s dislike for Mavis had gone up a notch since a recent spectacular snub in the corner shop. Sarah saw it as another sign of possible dementia but Jane had pointed out it was entirely in character and more likely just Mavis being Mavis.

  ‘Lisa’s no use to me, she doesn’t own her flat.’

  ‘Apparently the landlord’s a crook. Refuses to fix the boiler or repair the kitchen floor or—’

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’ Helena waved her hands, dismissing Lisa and her boring cracked floor. ‘My point is, Lisa doesn’t have a vested interest in the value of the house. Eventually,’ said Helena gaily, ‘my plan is to get rid of her, too.’

  ‘This is starting to feel like genocide.’

  ‘Just common sense.’

  How Leo could have leapfrogged from her bed to Helena’s baffled Sarah. The differences between the women went beyond the physical; their values were at odds. Sarah’s perfect world would entail everybody raised to the same level, whereas Helena would airbrush the unsightly poor out of the picture.

  A vivid memory flared in Sarah’s mind of Leo, brandy balloon in hand, begging, ‘Oh, do put a sock in it, Sarah darling! I do so hate your woman-of-the-people schtick!’ He’d never understood why she bled on behalf of strangers, why she cried at the news and pledged money for famine victims. Now he was with a woman who’d never challenge his blinkered apathy.

  ‘I’m toying with making changes to my apartment,’ said Helena.

  Flat B was an endless project. A new mural here. Some fresh gilding there. ‘Surely there’s nothing left to do.’

  ‘Leo and I will need some extra space at some point.’ Helena was coy with a capital ‘c’.

  ‘What for?’ The answer shimmered just out of reach; masochistically Sarah reached for it.

  ‘We’ll need a nursery, silly.’

  ‘Are you . . .’

  Helena jumped, and laid a hand across her midriff. ‘Oh my God, do I look fat?’

  ‘You look like a leaf, Helena.’

  Pacified, Helena said, ‘Let’s put it this way: we’re trying.’ She giggled suggestively. ‘Trying hard!’

  It wasn’t malice. If Helena had popped that image into Sarah’s head on purpose,
Sarah could have simply hated her for it, but Helena wouldn’t bother trying to make Sarah jealous; she barely noticed her. She’d embezzled Leo with little effort, and now she managed to forget that Sarah was Leo’s ex-wife.

  ‘What about you, Sarah? Is your biological clock ticking?’

  Out and out cattiness would be preferable to this insulting amnesia. Rivalry would elevate Sarah to her proper position as Wounded Ex. ‘If it is,’ said Sarah, ‘it’s not ticking very loudly, ’cos I can’t hear it.’

  ‘How’s your flat coming along? It’s a lot of work for one person.’

  ‘I’ve had some help recently.’ Compulsively, Sarah outed Leo to his wife; if they all had their cards on the table, Sarah’s conscience would clear. If Sarah was to turn the juggernaut of Leo’s second marriage it must be done out in the open. ‘Leo’s been amazing.’

  ‘Leo?’ A tiny crease appeared between Helena’s on-point brows. ‘My Leo?’

  Sarah couldn’t bring herself to say ‘Your Leo’. ‘He pulled up a carpet today and whisked it off to the dump for me.’

  ‘Sarah, you know I don’t understand your humour.’

  ‘The other day he waxed a dresser.’

  Helena stared hard, then threw back her head and showed off her long lovely throat to cackle so loudly she drew looks. ‘Oh, that man of mine! What a clever old dog.’ She recovered. ‘He’s a sly boots. The more Leo helps you, the quicker your flat gets finished and the quicker we get our hands on it. Confidentially, all gals together . . .’ Helena lowered her voice. ‘I wanted to make you an offer right after the wedding, but Leo thought that might be inappropriate. You know what a softie he is.’