Chapter 15
She arrived at Dan’s place only twenty minutes late which, all things considered, wasn’t bad. The flat occupied the ground floor of a big old house in the heart of Winchmore Hill, a short walk from the Green with its fancy coffee shops and lovely old pub. She was impressed.
There was a shy moment when he opened the door, an exchange of forced smiles and hellos , a result of neither of them being quite certain where they stood with each other. She started apologising for being late and, as if this was some prearranged signal, he suddenly took her in his arms and they kissed. His kissing was earnest, almost fierce, but there was something slightly stiff about it, too, as if he was metaphorically holding her at arms length. It was almost as though he was trying to convince himself that he wanted this. He's just shy , she told herself. We hardly know each other. Maybe things moved a little too quickly last time. She smelled his cologne and smiled.
“No Eau de Turpentine this week then?”
He laughed. “I didn’t think it was quite me. ”
“I don’t know about that. It seemed to do the trick.” She gave him a bawdy wink, hoping it might relax him.
He brushed her sleeve with his fingers. “You look fabulous.”
“Thank you. So do you. I like a man in a polo shirt.”
“I feel underdressed.”
“Don’t worry, I wear dresses all the time. This is casual wear for me.”
He gave her the tour, and she gasped at the size of the rooms. “You could fit my entire flat in your front room and still have space for two grand pianos,” she said.
She was over-awed by it, feeling like an exposed prey animal. She liked her nooks, her cosy corners, her library aisles and restaurant booths. The emptiness of this place oppressed her, and would make her sad, she thought, were she ever to live here. The house she grew up in had been fairly big, but crammed with furnishings, objets d’art, books and paintings.
“You weren’t joking about not having any furniture were you?” she said.
“I have a place to eat and a place to sleep. That’ll do me for now. I’ll pick up other bits when I get round to it.”
“What about a sofa?”
“I’ve got a beanbag… Hey, don’t look at me like that. It’s surprisingly comfy.”
“I’ll believe that when I sit on it. ”
“I should warn you, it’s more of a sprawl-type experience.”
At the back of the flat was a large ground-floor extension housing the kitchen and dining area. The garden, just visible in the purple twilight through a pair of French windows, was surprisingly small – just a patio and a rectangle of lawn.
“At last! Something normal-sized,” she said.
“Do you like it?”
“Well, it’s a lawn.” He looked disappointed, so she tried again. “It’s a very beautiful lawn.”
“It is, isn’t it?”
He opened a bottle of Merlot and poured them each a glass. “Would you care to avail yourself of my beanbag Mademoiselle?”
“Lead on, good sir!”
They were giggling now. It was like last week, only not quite. He’s not feeling it , she thought anxiously. He’s going through the motions, being polite. I must have done something wrong. What did I do?
The beanbag, which he’d placed in front of his movie-sized TV in the larger of the two reception rooms, was fun – a comedy piece of furniture. However much she tried to seat herself on it, she always ended up half-lying in an ungainly slouch. She made Dan laugh at her attempts to lounge elegantly, but she was disappointed when he didn’t attempt to join her on it. Instead, he sat down on the floorboards next to her with his back against the wall. This isn’t just shyness , she thought. He’s distancing himself from me.
He asked if she was hungry, and she said she might be. He said he was cooking her dinner tonight as an apology for distracting her last week and ruining the brownies. “Hey, I enjoyed being distracted,” she said, but he didn’t seem to take this in, just repeated that he was doing this to make up for what happened last week. It was almost as if he was trying to make things square between them so that all debts of honour were fully paid off and they’d never have to see each other again.
Dan had grown quite serious. He wasn’t meeting her eye, and Kay started to despair. She felt herself sliding back into her Slough of Despond. She wanted to run away and be by herself. Sondra’s voice tried to reassure her: This is good news. You’ll never have to see him again, which means you can let go of the pretence and go back to being the person you really are.
But Kay was determined not to give up on Elaine without a fight. With desperate joviality, she said to Dan, “You know you can cook for me any time you like. You don’t need an excuse. Besides, I didn’t care one bit about those brownies. It was worth it for the afternoon and evening we spent together. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.”
“I did,” he said. “Very much so.”
She thought he might at least kiss her then, but he didn’t. He just went on staring at the blank TV screen, taking the odd small sip from his wine glass.
“Is something wrong, Dan?” she asked, her voice sounding very small in the empty room.
He didn’t respond, just went on staring and taking small sips of wine. The beanbag had long since lost its entertainment value. She felt trapped in its snug, rigid embrace and wished there was a graceful way of extracting herself from it.
“Do you want me to go?” she eventually asked.
He turned to face her then, and she saw he was in pain. His lower lip was red, either from the wine or because he’d bitten it. His jaw was tight, his eyes soft with suffering, like that spaniel’s she’d seen in Bush Hill Park.
Oh Hell! she groaned inwardly. He knows, he knows…
“I have to ask you something, Elaine, and you must promise to tell me the truth.”
“What is it?” she asked, scarcely able to breathe. Her lungs felt like lead.
“Do you know my brother?”
“Your brother?” she burst out, hiding her panic behind a cloak of surprise. Then a new voice made its debut in her head. It had a rough London accent, like that guy, Garfield something ridiculous Blake, who came into the library the other day – the one who knew how to detect a liar. Don’t admit to anything , he advised her . You’ve got no idea what he knows. Just play innocent for as long as you can. We can always change tack later if things get sticky.
She heard herself say, “No, I don’t think so,” and was surprised by how calm and convincing she sounded. “Why do you ask?”
Dan shook his head and took a deeper gulp of wine. “It’s just this thing that’s been bugging me all week. Something you said last Sunday. I was telling you about my brother and then you came out with his name, Jeremy . I’ve gone back over our conversation several times, and I definitely never mentioned it.”
Kay wanted to kick herself, though such a manoeuvre would have been impossible on the beanbag. What a stupid schoolgirl error! She waited for Garfield Blake to come through again with his advice. Agree with him that he didn’t tell you, it’s safest that way , he said .
“You didn’t, that’s true,” said Kay. “You absolutely did not tell me his name.”
“So how could you have possibly known it?” Dan demanded. “This is what’s been bugging me.”
In her head, Garfield was ranting at her: Think – THINK damn you! – of any possible way you could have learned his name other than the way you did.
“Actually, you know how I found out?” she said. “It was… it was in fact, actually in fact…”
“What?” Dan frowned.
And then, like a Roman candle bursting to life in her brain, it came to her. “It was actually Jenny who told me.”
“Jenny? ”
“Yeah. There’s um… there’s this picture on the wall of your reception, quite near the Van Gogh Sunflowers . It shows two rather handsome young men holding crash helmets and posing next to a pair of quad bikes. While I was waiting for you, I asked Jenny about it, and she told me that was you and your brother Jeremy. That’s how I knew.”
Kay’s body felt as tight as a wire-framed sculpture as she awaited his response. When she saw the grin of relief breaking over his face, she briefly closed her eyes and began to breathe again. She maintained her porcelain-smooth demeanour, but inside she was a wreck, stressed to cracking point and wanting to scream with euphoria for remembering that little framed photo on the wall.
To ease some of the pressure inside, she turned her fire on him. “What on Earth were you thinking, Dan? That I’d been stalking you and your brother or something?”
“No. Well, yeah. Maybe. My head was full of so many crazy suspicions. It’s because I like you and last Sunday was great, and when things seem too good to be true, I start kicking the tyres – sorry, bad metaphor, but you know what I mean. There were a few little things about you, about the way we met, that were gnawing at me, and then you knowing Jeremy’s name just tipped the scales and I started to get worried.”
“What little things?” Kay asked.
Dan went through the list, and Kay was relieved because they were all things she found it quite easy to explain away. It helped that he seemed to want to believe her. The story about Jenny and the photo in reception seemed to have changed everything for him. Finally, he said, “I’m so sorry Elaine for mistrusting you.”
“That’s okay. I mean, I can understand why you did. Everything’s happened so quickly and not at all in the usual order.”
“Yeah, that’s true, and I need to learn that life is sometimes like that – crazy, romantic things can happen and there aren’t always sharks in the lake.”
“Sharks in the…?”
“Never mind,” he said, beaming at her. “I have to do something now, I hope you don’t mind.”
Her heart tightened. “What do you have to do?”
He removed the wine glass from her hand and set it carefully down. “I’m going to have to kiss you.”
“Oh, that’s…”
Before she could say any more, he leapt onto the beanbag and threw his arms around her. His weight and exuberance were too much for the bag, and it tipped them both unceremoniously onto the floor, where they lay in each other’s arms laughing.
“This is how I like to apologise,” he said.
“It’s very original.”
Dan kissed her on both cheeks, her nose, her left eyebrow and her right ear, and between each kiss he said sorry.
Kay drank in his apologies and his kisses and felt quite a lot like a piece of coral after a terrible storm, as the seas start to grow calmer and sunlight ripples through the blue water, warming the reef. She was slowly coming alive again.
Another part of her felt like a barracuda, eyeing the reef for any tasty snacks.
I’m good at this , she thought. Now all I have to do is kill Jenny, and my secret is safe.