Chapter Two
The following morning, in leafy Belsize Park, Jane’s favorite stepchild, Dexter, opens the door to his apartment.
His white-blond hair is scraped back off his face with a wide Lycra band and he is wearing an oversized sweatshirt, tiny shorts, and huge slippers in the form of a pair of sausage dogs.
His face crumples at the sight of Hugo on the floor at Jane’s feet and he immediately drops to his haunches to greet him.
“Oh my God,” he says to the dog. “You are so beautiful!” He looks up at Jane with gentle eyes. “He’s so lovely! Don’t give him back!”
“I don’t want to,” says Jane. “But we have to. Shall I come in then?”
Dexter lives with his best friend in a high-ceilinged one-and-a-half-bedroom apartment paid for by his father, who is Jane’s second ex-husband, Tony.
Dexter is Tony’s eldest child, just turned twenty-three, and despite a life of extreme privilege he is one of the sweetest, purest people that Jane has ever known.
He was just eight when Jane married his father, a knock-kneed, skinny, scruffy boy with terrible eczema and a shock of wild white hair.
They bonded over the family pet, a pug called Garibaldi that nobody else seemed to like, and have been close ever since.
The apartment is a tip; evidence of the night before lies everywhere. Empty shot glasses, makeup mirrors, stained tissues, a vodka bottle, a half-drunk bottle of prosecco, a sticky cocktail glass, and a carton of corner-shop pineapple juice.
“Let me just throw some clothes on,” says Dexter. “I won’t be long.”
Jane eyes the disarray and resists the urge to tidy it away. “What time did you get to bed last night?” she calls out to Dexter.
“Three. Four. I think.”
It’s currently 11 a.m. and Jane is impressed that Dexter was able even to get to the door, let alone appear fresh-faced and raring to go. He returns a moment later in the same sweatshirt, with a pair of oversized jeans and a baseball cap, and says, “Let’s go.”
The address on the piece of paper that Hester the vet gave her sounds familiar: “Thornwood, The Vale of Health, NW3.”
It brings a kind of flickering image to Jane’s mind—a strange house at night, a Victorian streetlight, a sense of dread—but she can’t put the image into any kind of context. It’s only as she and Dexter head through Hampstead Village and down into the Vale of Health that she starts to remember.
“Oh,” she says, as they descend into the Vale, toward the hamlet. “I think I—”
She stops, her breath held.
“What?” says Dexter.
“Nothing,” says Jane.
A man. A tall man. A bar in Soho.
Jane was twenty-nine. It was the year 2000 and she’d just left her first husband, the Viscount.
She’d been single and heartbroken and a bit desperate.
She was very thin, she remembers, had barely eaten for weeks, and she was, she is sure, very drunk and possibly crying.
He was older than her, the man, probably in his mid-forties and looked like a character from a black-and-white movie.
“You look like you should be called Horace,” she’d said, “or Cecil.”
He hadn’t told her his real name, merely smiled and bought her another drink.
“Why are you so sad?” he’d asked her, and she’d told him about the Viscount, who’d turned out to be a huge disappointment, more interested in his old school friends than in Jane and his young, motherless children.
“And now,” she’d said, “it’s just me again, a tragic orphan rattling around this big old world with nobody to hold on to. ”
“You’re very pretty,” he’d said. “And utterly charming. It won’t be too long before you’re snapped up again.”
She’d clocked his wedding ring then and asked him about it. “Ah,” he’d said. “Yes. Very happily married. For nearly ten years.”
“So why are you talking to me?”
“Because you looked like you needed a friend.”
He’d told her he worked at a department store in the West End. He’d told her that they were hiring staff; he could, he told her, get her an interview as a shop-floor assistant.
“I’m not sure I’m a shop-floor kind of a person,” she’d said. “I’d get complaints and be sacked in a week.”
He’d looked at her with wry amusement and then said, “You know, our au pair girl just left, went back to Brazil. You said you’ve been living with small children?”
Jane nodded.
“I have two small children, and a lovely home and wife who doesn’t really like housework. What would you think about maybe being some kind of housekeeper? Or nanny?”
Jane laughed. But then stopped. “Seriously?” she asked.
“Yes, seriously,” he replied. “Why don’t you come home with me? You can meet my wife, look at the house, see what you think.”
Jane had felt a pulse of something wrong then, a distant siren in her consciousness warning her of something she could not quite put her finger on.
But also, she remembers, a little thrill of something—something dark and self-destructive, a sense of throwing it all away because she remembers feeling entirely worthless in that moment.
There was no future back then that she could picture or hold on to.
There was no mother, no father, no brother, no husband, no job, no sense of what on earth she even was.
She remembers the feeling of her self-esteem lurking somewhere out of sight, too far away for her to grab hold of it in that moment and think: What am I doing?
And so she and this tall, charming, nameless man, whom she insisted on calling Cecil all night long, sat silently together in the back of a taxi, and she remembers vividly the strange sensation of leaving the heart of loud, high-octane Friday-night London, full of vodka and recreational drugs, and finding herself twenty minutes later in a sleepy Dickensian hamlet formed of tiny lamplit alleyways and rows of mismatched houses, seemingly cut off from the rest of the world.
“Where are we?” she’d asked.
“Hampstead,” he’d said.
“This isn’t Hampstead,” she’d said, thinking of the brightly lit urban village full of bars, pubs, and boutiques.
He’d told her that the Vale of Health had been annexed from the main village in the eighteenth century as a sanctuary from the plague.
The hamlet had once been peopled by the most fashionable writers and artists of the time, but now it was a quiet backwater, surrounded on all sides by the wilds of Hampstead Heath.
“How long have you lived here?”
“Fifteen years,” he replied. “It belonged to my mother-in-law. She just passed away a few months ago, and now it belongs to my wife, and me.”
She remembers her spinning head, the vertiginous mix of alcohol, excitement, and fear as the taxi crept slowly down the tiny lane, almost vanishing into the blackness.
As they slowed to a halt, Jane saw ahead of them a wooden fence that followed the curve of the Heath. Beyond that was nothing.
“Wow,” Jane had said. “It looks like the last house in the world.”
“Sometimes,” the man had said, “it feels like maybe it is.”
They walked through a green gate and onto a small driveway just big enough for the open-backed army jeep parked across it. Jane’s father once had an old jeep, similar to this one, and, like this one, it had sat outside their house for years rusting into a grotesque eyesore.
A woman had come to the window at the sound of their footsteps, a pretty woman with black hair in a feathered bob, dark eyes watching warily.
At the sight of her, Jane had begun to sober up.
As they approached the front door she could hear the rumble of the taxi making its way out of the hamlet, and suddenly she’d wanted to turn and run, flag it down, beat on its doors, ask it to take her home.
But then the man with no name touched her elbow gently and said, “Here, let me introduce you,” and Jane had found herself, as she had so often over the course of her stupid, mismanaged life, being dragged along into someone else’s narrative, because she had never had one of her own, and so she had followed him, that tall, imposing man, into his house, and been introduced to his wife and made awkward small talk with her while the man with no name mixed her a martini, and her memories are hazy now, splashes of color, a detail or two: a brown cabinet housing a home computer, photographs of a boy and girl, both around eight or nine, a gray cat, a Liberty-print lampshade.
Her image of the woman is hazy too, but she remembers a large engagement ring, a pursed mouth, and she remembers the sudden blinding, deafening realization she should not be there, that she had taken the wrong fork in the road, and then as the man passed her the martini there was a scream and a thud from upstairs that made her jump so hard she knocked the glass out of the man’s hand.
“Fuck,” he’d said, angrily, under his breath.
“I’m really sorry,” she’d said.
The woman jumped to her feet. “The children,” she’d said.
Neither made a move upstairs; there was no sound of a weeping child.
“I’ll make you another one,” he’d said.
“You know, actually, I think I’ll probably skip the drink. I think—”
“Nonsense,” he’d said, with enough force to make Jane flinch. “I’ll make you another.”
He’d gone to the cabinet again and she had smiled nervously at the wife, who had given her some kind of warning glance; Jane couldn’t tell if it was friendly or unfriendly, but there had been a long silence, she remembers that, and inside that silence she made her plan.
“Is it OK if I go outside?” she’d said. “To smoke a cigarette?”
She remembers not waiting for permission, she remembers the solid feel of the strap of her handbag held inside her fist, she remembers the pulse of adrenaline that pushed her heart up hard against her rib cage.
She remembers the tall man coming toward her, a fresh martini in his hand, and staring at her.
“Stay,” he’d said, holding it out to her. “Drink your martini.”
“I won’t be long,” she’d said lightly. “I can’t drink gin without nicotine, you know what it’s—”
“Stay,” he’d said again, and she remembers the feel of his other hand on her wrist, the sense of being tugged, and she remembers the wife putting herself between them.
“Let her go,” she’d said to the man. “The children are awake.”
Jane had felt the tension drop, his grip soften and then loosen entirely.
Her hands shook as she lit her cigarette outside the front door.
She’d looked up at the dark windows above, wondering about the scream and the bang, but all was dark, all was quiet.
And then, with a driving sense of urgency, she’d tiptoed across the crunchy gravel, quietly unhooked the inside latch of the gate, and then, and only then, had held her bag tight to her stomach and run and run and run.
Now as she watches the dot on her phone app moving through the Vale toward the house called Thornwood, she feels it in her gut, even before they get there: It’s the same house.