Chapter 13
THIRTEEN
LAUREL
Damask Square. The last time I’d seen it – the only time – I’d expected to just be passing through.
It had been a detour, a random decision I took when I got slightly lost cycling through East London to the Docklands, where I was planning on taking the foot tunnel across to Greenwich to do some hill sprint training.
And look how that worked out.
Today I was an official visitor, coming on foot, and that wasn’t all that was different.
Then, I’d been enjoying the freedom of a Saturday on my own, the pleasure of pushing my bike and my body to their limits, taking for granted that here was my life, my time, and I was using it in a way that would make me happy.
Now, life, time and happiness all seemed like the most fragile things imaginable.
I turned off the main road at the corner by the newsagent – a shabby relic that must have stood there long before the market got upgraded with designer shops around its perimeter and the Square Mile extended its borders beyond Bishopsgate like an invading army.
I felt a bit like an invader too.
The square was just as I remembered it. The iron railings, the tall, graceful houses, the silence that surrounded me as soon as I left the main road behind.
Posh, I’d thought then, and I thought it again now.
Perhaps I should have worn something different, to fit in.
A taupe trench coat and over-the-knee boots, or something like that.
Only I didn’t own anything like that, so I was wearing jeans and trainers.
Gray wouldn’t care, but it wasn’t only Gray I was going to see.
The smell of compost reached me, and inside the railed square I could see a middle-aged woman on her knees, doing something to the beds of rosebushes that were planted in its centre.
She lifted her head as I passed and watched as I approached the door of number eight, raising a gloved hand in greeting before returning to her work.
I didn’t wave back. I felt too out of place, too alien, too nervous.
I raised my hand towards the brushed-steel knocker on the door, which was painted an even slate grey. But just as my fingertips reached its cool surface, the door opened.
A woman stood there, looking at me with wariness bordering on hostility.
She was tall – statuesque, I suppose you might say if you liked flowery words.
Her hair was blonde and shiny, and her eyes were blue.
She was wearing jeans too, but hers were perfectly fitting, not baggy at the knees like mine.
Her jumper was rose pink and looked like cashmere.
Her skin was clear and glowing, the skin of a woman who’d always toned and moisturised and worn SPF 50 even in winter.
Anna. Gray’s wife.
‘Hello,’ I said.
‘Laurel.’ She pronounced my name like it left a bad taste in her mouth. ‘Gray’s sleeping, but you may as well come in.’
I stepped into the hallway. The first time I’d seen it, I was too shocked and, let’s face it, too embarrassed (because who wants to be peeled off the pavement by a handsome man after somehow fracturing their wrist falling off a bike while travelling at less than twenty miles an hour?
Plus, I’d almost killed his cat) to take much in.
Now, though, I noticed the details. The industrial-style pendant light. The stairs stretching upwards, carpeted in a monochrome geometric pattern. The jewel-coloured paint and peony-printed wallpaper in the front room, which I glimpsed through a half-open door as we walked past.
‘We’ll go downstairs,’ Anna said. It was more a command than an invitation, so I followed her obediently.
Downstairs was equally swanky. At one end was what I presumed was a family room – shelves groaning with books, squashy teal sofas, a television with a picture of the cat on its sleeping screen.
In the centre was a huge wooden dining table, one side suspended from the ceiling and the other supported by a single leg, like a letter L on its side.
The far end was taken up by a vast kitchen with a marble-topped island, a wine cooler, a space-age coffee machine and shelves stacked with cookbooks.
Beyond, glass doors and a flight of flagstone steps led up to the garden.
It was a gorgeous house. The kind of place I might have dreamed of living in if I’d ever seen anything like it for real before.
‘Your home is lovely,’ I said, pausing to take it all in.
Anna looked back at me, her face still. ‘Coffee?’
Clearly, we were not going to be new BFFs – not that I’d expected that. Still, I felt myself tightening with embarrassment, not knowing whether I would offend her more by accepting or declining, or if it would make no difference because I had offended her so much already just by existing.
And sleeping with her husband, of course.
‘I was going to make some anyway,’ she said, as if relenting slightly.
‘Thanks.’ I smiled cautiously. ‘That would be great.’
She flew into action, as if she was relieved to have something to do, offering me milk and sugar (‘Frothed or flat? Brown or white?’) and putting homemade shortbread on a plate.
I wondered if she always had baked goods on hand in case of unexpected guests or whether she’d made it especially, not as a gesture of welcome but as a way of saying, See? This is the life he’s had with me.
Or maybe, having teenage children, she simply kept her kitchen full of calorie-dense treats as a matter of course.
We sat together at the kitchen counter and drank our coffee, talking first about the weather and then, formally, as if he was just some mutual acquaintance, about Gray’s health.
‘He gets very tired,’ she said, ‘and his appetite’s not great.’
‘That’ll be the pain medication, I expect. Have they given him anything to help his appetite?’
‘Yes, but…’ She shrugged, then glanced at her phone. ‘He’s awake now. I’ve put a baby monitor up there. It seems ridiculous, but it was the best thing I could think of.’
‘That’s a really good idea,’ I said. ‘In a house this size…’
I was interrupted by a click and a rattle, and the cat came strolling in through his flap from the garden.
Again, I remembered seeing him that first time, unsure if it was a feline or canine trying to commit hara-kiri beneath my bike wheels.
Now I could see that he was, in fact, an exceptionally large animal, black and white and fluffy, with a magnificent set of whiskers.
I got off my stool and squatted down to fuss him. ‘Hello, Augustus.’
It was as if the temperature in the room had suddenly dropped ten degrees. I heard the rattle of crockery as Anna put our coffee things in the dishwasher, then felt her standing over me.
‘You may as well go up,’ she said.
‘Okay. Thank you. Is it…?’
‘I’ll show you. And, Laurel…’
I looked at her. Her blue eyes were as cold as marbles.
‘You’ve fucked my husband. You can befriend my cat if you like. But stay the hell away from my children.’
By the time we’d climbed two storeys’ worth of stairs to reach the bedroom, I’d managed to compose myself.
Anna’s words – or not so much her words but the venom with which she’d spoken – had thrown me.
Of course she was angry with me. I would be too.
Anyone would be. But seeing it like that, seeing that poised, smooth face twisting with rage, hearing her middle-class London voice turn into a hiss of fury, was frightening.
So frightening I wanted to let myself straight out of the Farrow I couldn’t imagine the kids not having a floor to themselves in a house like this.
Anna tapped on the door, opened it and said, ‘She’s here.’
Then she turned and walked away.
I stepped in. The bed was below the window, the open curtains letting sunlight flood in, falling on the white sheets and Gray’s pale face and hands. Was it my imagination, or had his hair got whiter too, since the last time I saw him?
But his smile was the same as always. ‘Come to take my blood pressure, nurse?’
It was a running joke between us. The first time I told him what I did for a living, he’d said, ‘A nurse? Every red-blooded man’s fantasy,’ and I – having heard comments like that too often before – had pointed out that, after a day in a polyester uniform running around an overheated hospital, I was no one’s fantasy except an anosmiac’s.
‘Shut it, pervert,’ I said.
Gray burst out laughing, and so did I. I ran the few steps across the room and threw myself down on the bed next to him, feeling his arms enfold me.
For a few minutes we just lay there, holding each other.
I felt our chests rising and falling in unison as my breath steadied.
I could smell his familiar aftershave overlaying the other smells that were familiar too, but not his smells.
I could hear birdsong outside, the distant hum of traffic and a faint crackling from the headphones on the bedside table, which he must have removed without pausing whatever he’d been listening to.
After a bit, I kissed him and sat up. ‘I brought you a present.’
‘You didn’t have to. I’m graped up to the max.’
‘Just as well I didn’t bring grapes, then.’ I stuck my tongue out at him. ‘I brought a game. It’s called Oh My Pigeons.’
I took the box out of my bag and laid it on his lap.
‘It says, “Suitable for ages eight and up.” Glad you’ve got such a high opinion of me.’
‘I figured it was about the level of your taste in dirty jokes.’
He laughed. ‘Seriously, Laurel. This is great. You know, the kids… they come up and see how I’m doing and then they sort of drift off again. It’s like they don’t…’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘Maybe this’ll help. Shall we have a go first though? So you can teach them how it works?’
We unpacked the game and I lay on the pillow next to him so we could study the instructions.
‘It says the person who saw a pigeon most recently gets to start,’ he complained. ‘That’s not fair.’
‘What’s not fair? You’re lying here right by an open window and I’m inside a hospital all day. Come on.’
‘Next time you’d better bring me a bird feeder, then I’ll always get to start.’
‘My God, and I thought you public school boys were all about fair play.’
‘All’s fair in love and Oh My Pigeons.’
We laughed, and by the time we got the game under way we were laughing even harder. I won the first, he won the second and I won the third. He tried to insist on playing the best of five, but I could see he was tiring, and I felt I was outstaying my welcome.
So I said, ‘Come on, give me a cuddle instead.’
I packed away the cards and pieces and lay down with my head on his shoulder, my hand inside his pyjama top. The skin down the side of his body was as soft as an expensive leather handbag; I stroked it, just firmly enough that he wouldn’t get ticklish.
Then my thumb found the end of the nephrectomy scar, and I paused there.
‘Do you ever think about him?’ I asked.
‘Who? Joel? Not really,’ he murmured. His voice was muffled, and his eyes were closing.
‘You don’t see him any more?’
‘Haven’t done in years. We lost touch. Water under the bridge. I’d paid my debt.’
I didn’t ask any more. I just lay there with him, feeling his breathing slow until at last it came out in a snore. Then I eased myself away from him, picked up my bag and shoes and tiptoed out.
Anna was waiting by the front door. It was only when I saw her that I wondered whether she’d been watching us the whole time, via the baby monitor app on her phone.