TWENTY-TWO
Things at Zig and Fi’s place were understandably a bit frosty, now that she was a traitor and all, literally sleeping with the enemy. She spent as much time as she could out of the flat, drifting around London between the various volunteer projects she was involved in, crashing a few nights at other people’s places, and generally trying to convince herself that the aching feeling in her chest had little to do with missing a certain tall, dark, and aggravating man.
On the day of the birthday dinner, she went to his flat as arranged. They hadn’t exchanged numbers. She hadn’t seen him or heard from him in ten days since he’d dropped her off at Zig’s. It felt alien and unreal to be walking up to his building, pressing the buzzer. He might not even be in. Might have forgotten all about it, be wondering why the hell she was there. She was wondering the same thing herself, had half a mind to flee, because the rapid beating of her pulse was painful. She must be mad, voluntarily subjecting herself to this, choosing to be here… Mad. Mad. Why did she like him so much?
A curt, “Come up,” and her heart walloped her in the throat.
Walking into the building, entering the lift, pressing the button… She was really doing it. Evie Blackton going to Aubrey Ford. And not even for anything fun, but to spend an evening with his entire family at a teenager’s birthday party. She must be mad, mad, mad.
He opened the door, crisp and delicious and very dark-eyed in a white shirt and dark trousers. He smiled. “Hello.”
“Hi.”
The flat was as she remembered, and also completely surreal after her time away from it—time spent at Zig and Fi’s, and a night on someone’s houseboat, and a sofa in someone’s attic, and days spent scrubbing pots in a community kitchen, and days spent wading in a river clearing invasive weeds, and days spent drinking cheap coffee from a shared thermos, and cleaning dirt from her nails, and sticking a plaster on the back of her grazed hand, and the smell of rain macs and exertion and stale cigarette smoke and incense on people’s clothes… And here was Aubrey, impeccable and neat, in his minimal designer flat. It couldn’t work. She was mad.
“I like this dress,” he said.
“It’s one of Maisie’s.”
“Maisie?”
“My friend. She makes clothes from old fabrics—from old clothes.”
“I thought it was designer. Your mother’s money.”
“No. Just Maisie.” She smiled limply.
“Just Maisie,” he agreed.
“How was your trip?”
“Awful. I thought of nothing but you.”
“That does sound awful.”
He gave her a flat look, and she smiled.
“And did you miss me, Evie?”
She shook her head, trying not to grin. “Nope.”
“I see.”
“Not even a little. In fact, who are you? One of Roscoe’s friends, I think?”
He gave her a dark-eyed look, smiling slowly as he backed her up against the door she’d just walked through. “That’s right. I know him from work.”
His palms slid under the skirt of her dress and up her thighs to her hips, holding her firm against the door as his thumbs crept under the elastic of her underwear. Her arms linked around his neck.
“From work?” she prompted, blood sparking at the heat in his eyes.
“Yes.” He slipped his hand fully into her underwear, cupping her mound, his palm warm, the pressure of it firm, sending her thoughts tipping. “Where I do very wicked things.”
“Uh-huh,” she managed, losing the battle as his hand started to move. Her head tipped back against the door, his mouth grazed her neck, and it was all very fast after that, Aubrey taking her up against the door with them both still mostly dressed.
“I might have missed you a bit,” she admitted, still breathless, face pressed to his neck as they both came back to earth.
“Good,” he said. “Time to go.”
He reached past her for the door handle, smiling at her glare. But his eyes were soft and warm, and so was the kiss he pressed to her lips. “I missed you like crazy, Evie,” he said quietly. “Don’t doubt it.”
Aubrey parked on the gravelled drive outside a double-garage, a towering beech tree shading its roof. Several other cars were parked around the drive. The house was big, detached, on a leafy street between Hampstead and Golders Green.
“Ignore everything they say,” he said, getting out. “Especially Charlie.”
He hadn’t spoken much on the drive over, but she’d managed to get a brief lowdown on his family. His dad, Matthew, sixty-six years old and still practising law full time at the family firm, Ford & Ford. Matthew’s second wife, Priya, twenty years younger, a criminal prosecution lawyer and, according to Aubrey, the loveliest person in the world. He’d used the description as though it ought to be written with capital letters: inarguably true. His older brother, Andrew, also a lawyer at the family firm. His younger brother, Charlie, the human rights lawyer. And Asha, Aubrey’s half-sister, fourteen years old and apparently ready to take over the world.
Evie got out of the car, smoothing down her dress. She didn’t feel daunted, had never been shy, but was wary, reluctant to step into the house and find herself presented with another facet of Aubrey she had no idea what to do with. He was already confusing enough, wouldn’t stay in any kind of box, labels refusing to adhere to him. Enemy? Ally? Friend? Lover? Just Aubrey, being too… Aubrey . Her own personal reckoning.
That first day at his flat when he brought her there from Conyers, she had finally summoned up the courage to return her friends’ many messages. Zig had been indignant, hurt, disappointed, gesticulating wildly over the video call, scrubbing stubby fingers through his scruffy gingery-blond hair. Fi had wrinkled her nose, pushed her glasses into her hair and said, “You couldn’t do it, or you wouldn’t? ”
“It felt wrong. I just… I had the laptop right there in front of me and I… I choked.”
“He doesn’t know?” Zig checked. “Doesn’t suspect you? So you can try again.”
“No… I don’t… I don’t want to.”
“But you’re still in contact with the guy? Still got an in?”
Evie had glanced around Aubrey’s flat, with its elegant designer furniture and ordered, masculine simplicity, a bookcase lightly and neatly filled with mostly serious things. And two copies of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 .
Fi had pulled her glasses back down and squinted at the screen. “Is that his flat? ”
Zig’s face had loomed closer. “Is his laptop there? Any paperwork?”
“No, you idiot.” Fi had elbowed him out of the way. “She’s staying at his flat. She’s sleeping with him. Aren’t you?”
Evie had pulled a face. “Maybe. A bit.”
“I knew this would happen,” Fi had announced, sitting back and nodding sagely to herself. “Saw his photo on the BlacktonGold website.”
Zig had stared at Evie through the screen, brow creased. “Are you? You’re literally sleeping with the enemy? What the fuck.”
He had disappeared from shot for a moment, walking off disgusted.
Fi had stared at Evie, biting her lip. “Bit awkward, this.”
“Yeah,” Evie had agreed softly.
“Do we have to tell FTP?”
“I’d rather you didn’t.”
“Is this it then? You’ve gone to the dark side?”
Zig had burst back onto the screen before Evie could answer. He was standing up, only just in frame behind the sofa where Fi sat.
“I can’t believe this, Evie. You of all people. I’m fucking… I’m fucking hurt , OK? You know what these people are like. What they do. The harm they cause. How can you forget all that? These entitled, heartless, greedy fuckers, and you…you…”
“He’s not like that. Not really.”
“Just because he’s got a pretty face—”
“Pretty’s not quite the right word,” Fi had interjected musingly, but unhelpfully.
“You need to have a long, hard look at yourself,” Zig had said savagely. “Work out what the fuck you’re doing, and how the fuck you’re going to live with yourself.”
It hadn’t been much fun, as far as phone calls went. And the days since hadn’t been much fun either. How did one balance between two such opposing worlds? Surely it was only going to hurt, any attempt to cut herself in two.
But: “Ready?” Aubrey asked now, when they got out of his car. He walked around the front of it and took her hand. Together, they walked into the house.
Asha was gorgeous, and terrifying. And Charlie, Aubrey’s younger brother, looked almost exactly like the cute, chibi version of the man, his hair longer and slightly wavy, his eyes warmer and rounder, his mouth smiling non-stop. Andrew, the eldest, was tall, slim, and said nothing.
“Ignore the chatterbox,” Charlie said after dinner, dragging her away by the elbow after Andrew had gravely handed her a glass of juice, the wine not being vegan. “Come, sit.”
He installed her on a sofa next to him. There was a framed photograph on the small table beside it of all three brothers as children. Aubrey was in the middle, aged about five or six. Her heart gave an odd squeeze—that broody, motherly sort of feeling normally triggered by boxes of abandoned kittens. What would his children look like? Exactly like him, she imagined, and found herself smiling stupidly at the thought.
“Tell me everything,” Charlie prompted with a grin.
“About?” Evie said, laughing slightly.
“You, him, life, the world.”
She laughed again, amused by the thought that Charlie, in his wavy-haired, good-natured, starry-eyed exuberance was far more like the kind of guy she normally went for than his brother. He saved refugees for a living. Looked like he bathed in mountain streams and dewdrops. And he was happily married, his husband absent because he was, Charlie had explained loudly and fondly when they first arrived, working nights as a junior doctor on an emergency ward.
“You see now,” Aubrey had said into her ear, “why I’m the black sheep of the family.”
“Little lost sheep,” Priya had quipped, grinning, as she squeezed past, bowls of nuts in her hands. “Vegan,” she’d said, putting them on the coffee table with a smile at Evie.
She sat by that coffee table now with Charlie, helping herself to a handful of nuts, but not really hungry, because Priya had assembled a generous meal from all the various side dishes. A lot of the food she’d prepared was vegan anyway, she explained, balancing another samosa on Evie’s laden plate.
Asha was across the room, having a mild disagreement with her dad about the mobile phone she wanted for her next birthday, Priya was inexhaustibly bustling around, and Aubrey was sitting in the window seat of the large bay window nearby. There was a small tabby cat on his knee, writhing in ecstasy as he absently rubbed it behind the ears with a knuckle while talking with Andrew.
“And it worked, did it?” Andrew asked. “No push back?”
“Of course not,” Aubrey replied. “Cash-strapped local governments aren’t going to spend time quibbling. They’ll take the money and run.”
“But a site earmarked for sustainable development—”
“Bluedeen know how to tick all those boxes. Domnall didn’t buy them on a whim.”
Evie sat up, attention caught.
“It’s a win-win for him,” Aubrey continued. “Avoids tax on the capital, gets tax breaks designed to encourage investment, and can avoid paying tax on the rental income from the site now the shell companies are in place.”
“Luxembourg OKed it?”
“Yes. It’s a tried and tested set-up. The precedent’s already there, the regulators don’t have a leg to stand on.”
“Hm.” Andrew frowned. “It’s smart, I suppose.”
Aubrey smiled thinly. “And all perfectly legal.”
The other man muttered something Evie couldn’t catch. Then: “But HallardPuck are aggressive. They’re already being investigated by HMRC.”
“My property strategy is perfectly sound.”
Andrew gave a small shrug, then the conversation was interrupted by Matthew arriving to top up glasses.
“No thanks, I’m driving,” Andrew said.
“Me too,” Aubrey said. He looked over, caught Evie’s eye.
My property strategy. Bluedeen.
It was him. Evie knew it with a sick sense of certainty. It was Aubrey’s idea to buy the community garden site, bulldoze it, build cheap, ugly, unaffordable flats. And all to save Domnall having to pay the tax he ought to pay.
Aubrey frowned, dislodging the cat and coming over. “Are you alright? Shall we get going?”
“I swear,” said Charlie laughingly, “that I didn’t even tell her about the thing with the golf ball when you—”
“Shut up, Charlie,” said Aubrey, rolling his eyes.
Evie merely nodded, barely hearing the exchange. “Yes, let’s get going.”
She could hardly speak in the car. Answered Aubrey’s enquiries with monosyllables. He gave up after a while and drove with both hands heavy on the steering wheel, staring darkly at the road, the streetlamps passing over his face just as they had on that first taxi ride back from Roscoe’s. He’d joked about buying oil shares, weapons manufacturing. She’d hated him. Thought him the worst person she knew. And now…?
Their route to Zig’s took them past the tube station, past the off-licence, onto the road where…
“Stop the car,” she said.
“What?”
“Stop it. Here.”
Frowning, he did so, pulling over into the only available space: the gap in front of the gates to the building site.
“Are you going to be sick? Shall I—?”
Her voice cut over him, embarrassingly strident, quavering. “Do you know where we are? Laburnum Grove, N16. Sound familiar?”
“No. Should it?”
“There was going to be a garden here.” She looked straight through the windscreen as she spoke, unable to look at him, knowing she was on the edge of being overwhelmed by her too-strong emotions, that hysterical, weepy, embarrassing girl, crying over pigeons.
“A community garden,” she continued. “We got permission from the council, me, and Zig, and Fi, and we worked with the local primary school and the pensioners club that meets down the road. The project was designed to bring the two generations together and also to help the kids learn about nature, how to grow food. We got a bit of funding, the kids raised money at school, I donated what I could. And slowly, starting last autumn, working all through the winter, we built a garden on this scrap of land. We made raised beds out of wood salvaged from skips and old pallets. We painted it—the kids at the school painted them. Bees and flowers, and one kid who was really into trains painted trains on everything, but it was fine, because it was theirs . Their garden.”
Aubrey listened, polite enough to let her ramble on, expose her madness. He’d probably be glad when it was all over.
“We planted bulbs, bought seeds. A garden centre even donated some compost and pots. I left for Spain at the start of the year, but it was all ready, waiting for the first seeds to be planted. They sent me pictures when they did. The kids planted sunflower seeds. They were going to have a competition, see who could grow the tallest one. The local paper came down.”
She paused, breath suddenly failing.
“And then what happened?” Aubrey asked. She was sure he already knew. The Bluedeen logo was on the boarding beyond her window, lit up by the harsh, halogen streetlamps.
“Then the cash-strapped council sold the site to a company called Bluedeen. And they bulldozed it all. So that Domnall White could get a little bit richer. And it was all your idea.”
Aubrey nodded. “I see.”
“That’s all you have to say?” She rounded on him, all her hurt and sadness turning into rage.
He shrugged, one hand still resting on the top of the steering wheel. He flexed his fingers, watching them straighten, then curve tight. “Am I meant to defend the indefensible? Does it matter if I try? You already know what you think of me.”
“You don’t care? You’re not even going to—”
“Apologise? You knew all this had happened already, didn’t you? The first time we met you mentioned a garden and Domnall. It explains why you were so ready to hate me. And I suppose you overheard me talking to Andrew just now, which reminded you who I am. The same person you met at Roscoe’s. I haven’t changed. It’s not my fault if you forgot.”
“How can you just sit there…?” She was incredulous, choking back her tears, her anger. “You won’t even say sorry? ”
“What good would it do? What you want is for me to be someone I’m not.”
“You don’t even care, do you?”
His only reply was to turn on the engine, his expression cold, bitter.
“Where are you going?”
“Zig’s house, of course. You can cry on his shoulder, and hate me, and call me a bastard to your heart’s content.”
“You are a bastard, Aubrey,” she spat. “You’re not even human. All those sob stories you fed me about Liv, and you’ve no heart at all.”
“You can think that, if it helps. If it keeps your nice easy delineation between good people and bad.”
She wanted to hit him, shake him, force him to fight. Swimming in pain as she was, she knew even now that, later, in the darkest part of the night, it was the fact he had so easily given up that would hurt the worst.
They were already pulling up by the flat. He got her bags out of the boot, handed them to her as she climbed shakily out of the car.
He looked at her once, eyes black under the streetlamp’s pale glow.
“It’s how this was always going to end, Evie. We both know it. For what it’s worth…I’m sorry.”
And he drove away.