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Copyright
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2014
Copyright © Rosie Thomas 2014
Cover layout design Caroline Young © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020
Jacket photographs © DEEPOL by plainpicture/Gemma Ferrando, Shuttershock.com (all other images)
Rosie Thomas asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007563227
Ebook Edition © October 2020 ISBN: 9780007560547
Version: 2020-09-25
Praise for Rosie Thomas:
‘Rosie Thomas writes with beautiful, effortless prose, and shows a rare compassion and a real understanding of the nature of love’
The Times
‘Honest and absorbing, Rosie Thomas mixes the bitter and the hopeful with the knowledge that the human heart is far more complicated than any rule suggests’
Mail on Sunday
‘A master storyteller’
Cosmopolitan
‘Thomas’s novels are beautifully written. This one is a treat’
Marie Claire
‘A lush and sweeping voyage of self-discovery’
Eithne Farry, Daily Mail
‘Prepare to be dazzled … an epic tale of sisterhood and betrayal’
Company
‘Heart-rending and beautifully written … I read it in one delicious go, tears pouring down my face. You cannot fail to be moved’
Emma Lee-Potter, Express
‘A terrific book, beautifully written … questions about identity, belonging, infidelity, dying and forgiveness make this a very moving study of the human heart’
Australian Women’s Weekly
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Praise for Rosie Thomas
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Keep Reading …
About the Author
Also by Rosie Thomas
About the Publisher
One
The first time I saw the woman who later ran off with my husband she was giving directions to two removals men. They were struggling to lift a sofa round an awkward bend in the communal stairs and I was waiting to pass.
There were two flats per floor in Dunollie Mansions and this was evidently the new owner of the one directly above ours. Old widowed Mrs Bobinski had lived up there for twenty years in a fug of simmering soup fumes and mothballs, and then she died in hospital after a very brief illness and her heirs put the flat up for sale. It was on the market for months, partly because mansion flats like ours were no longer fashionable, if they ever had been, but mostly because the two nephews were asking too much money for it. I had heard from the Frasers on the top floor that the place was finally sold, but no one had any idea who our new neighbour would be.
‘Some nice, unremarkable couple just like us,’ Graham Fraser cheerfully assumed.
‘And us,’ I added, more thoughtfully.
I stood to one side to let the woman and her puffing retinue pass by. She was walking upstairs backwards and would have collided with me if I hadn’t put out my hand to steer her away. She wheeled round at once.
‘God, sorry. Can’t even look where I’m going. Hang on a sec.’ The last words were called down to the two young men. The one on the lower end hitched his shoulder under the padded arm and stared up in sweaty disbelief.
‘Don’t worry about us. We’ve got all day, Col, haven’t we?’
Ignoring him, she introduced herself to me. ‘I’m Lisa Kirk. Just moving in, number seven.’
‘Let your end down, Col.’
‘Right you are.’
I told the woman my name and pointed to our door. She was younger by far than anyone else currently living in the flats. I would have put her age at twenty-three, although I learned later that she was actually twenty-seven. Fifteen years or so younger them me. She had fair hair with blonde streaks and a soft leather rucksack slung over one shoulder. Even her combat pants had obviously come from somewhere expensive and fashionable, well away from the firing line. She looked as if she ought to be moving into a loft in Clerkenwell or a pastel-fronted little place in Notting Hill, not a flat in a stuffy red-brick block in a Kensington backwater.
‘If you need a cup of sugar. Or maybe gin …’ I said.
‘Thanks,’ she answered and smiled. An attractive smile. ‘You come and have a drink with me when I’ve got the glasses unpacked. Tell me what I should do with the place.’
I flattened myself against the wall as Col and his counterpart hoisted the sofa again. They laboured past me, with Lisa Kirk leading the way. I went out to post my letters and to the greengrocer’s down the side street to buy vegetables for dinner, then walked slowly back into the building.
The shallow stairs and the bare landings in Dunollie Mansions were kept clean and swept, and blown light bulbs always promptly replaced by Derek the caretaker who lived in the basement. There was a mahogany table to the left of the front door above which communal notices were posted, about things like holiday refuse collection, temporary interruptions to the water supply or work on the old-fashioned but effective central heating system. There was a faint scent of Derek’s floor polish and an even fainter whiff of disinfectant, and occasionally the rattle of the lift door grille followed by the hum of the machinery. It was a quiet, unflashy place.
I always liked the two solid doors on each landing, facing each other at a slight angle on either side of the stairwell, and the ornate brass door furniture worn with polishing, and the diamond panes of leaded glass on either side of the central panel. The hallways within were dark and would have been claustrophobic if the ceilings were not so high, but the rooms opening off them were bright and well-proportioned, especially the corner drawing rooms with their bay windows looking in two directions. From the top flats there was a view of the dome of the Albert Hall and a landscape of rooftops and chimneys, but in summertime our windows, lower down, framed nothing but the leafy plane trees out in the street. When there was a breeze the leaf patterns moved on the floor and furniture. Even in winter the bare branches made a screen against the walls and windows across the wide street.
I liked the sense of enclosure. And the well-ordered, dull and unimaginative sheer safety of everything.
It was not a background against which you could, for example, imagine anyone running amok. No one could chop through the three-inch thickness of the front doors. The walls and floors were solid too, and no murmur of the outside world ever penetrated. We all lived there in our separate castles, friendly enough and with Derek to sweep up: the Frasers on the top floor, and Mark and Gerard the gay couple who lived opposite Mrs Bobinski’s, and Peter and me, and the rest. But separate. There were no children in the block. The flats weren’t quite big enough for families. It was a place for small dogs, like Mark’s and Gerard’s schnauzer, and childless regret, like mine.
It was a few days before I saw Lisa Kirk again. I told Peter about her that evening, when he came home from work. I remember him sitting in the armchair against the Chinese yellow wall of the drawing room, with a drink on the stool beside him. It was September, and the leaves of the plane trees were just beginning to brown and crisp around the margins.
‘How old?’ he asked and I told him – underestimating by about four years as it later turned out.
‘Oh, God. It will be techno music at all hours and impossible parties, and people running up and down the stairs. We should operate on a co-op system, like the Americans. Nobody admitted unless approved by the committee.’
Peter affected fogeyishness, sometimes. It was one of the ways he tried to look after me, by pretending to be staider and more reliable and conservative than he really was. It was one of those unspoken contracts that long-standing couples make, knowing their partner’s needs and histories. In fact, he was a tolerant man, with a remarkable capacity to overlook other people’s foibles and most of the irritations generated by them.
‘We’ll see,’ I said, because there was nothing else to say, and moved on to the other snippets of the day’s news. I wasn’t working, then, and it was sometimes difficult to think of anything at all to relate. Lisa Kirk’s arrival was a welcome new topic.
When I met her for the second time we were both coming in with Safeway carrier bags, at the end of a damp afternoon with the smell of autumn thick under the plane trees.
She rested her bags on the stairs beyond our front door and looked down at me.
‘Come up and have a cup of tea. Have you got time?’
A commodity in abundant supply, as it happened. I pushed my own shopping into our hallway and followed her up, curious to see and know more.
Old Mrs Bobinski’s decor was mostly still in place: Regency striped wallpaper with darker rectangles outlined in grime where murky pictures had once hung, fluted wooden pelmets, central light fittings hideous in gilt and smoked glass. Against this backdrop Lisa had partially arranged her modishly beaten-up brown leather sofa, CD tower and two tall glass urns filled with coiled snakes of twinkling little lights.
‘It’s all a bit of a tip.’ She sighed. ‘I haven’t had time to think, let alone get anything done to it. I needed to move quickly after I split with Baz. And I really liked this place. Lofts are a bit done-that and Dunollie Mansions is so …’
She eyed me, transparently wondering which word to use in order not to offend me. ‘… Neutral,’ she concluded. ‘You know. I reckoned you could do anything here, make it into anything you wanted, without it being a statement.’
‘Really?’
I felt a twitch of dismay. This refuge, my safe haven, was about to teeter out on to some cutting edge of style. I didn’t want it to be invaded or to have its sagging face lifted.
‘If I ever get time. Come in the kitchen, I’ll make us some tea.’
There was the same schizophrenia in there. A maplewood butcher’s block on wheels, an espresso machine and Philippe Starck knick-knacks disposed against Mrs Bobinski’s yellow Formica, and one of those American refrigerators with an ice dispenser in the front, finished in pillar-box red. This monster fitted into none of the available spaces and hummed in the corner of the room next to the door like a TARDIS waiting to dematerialise. I found myself touching the polished metal handle, wondering where I would end up if I stepped inside and let it take me along.
‘Are you hungry?’ Lisa was asking, watching my hand hovering. ‘I’m afraid there’s not a lot in there, I’m not much of a kitchen person really, it’s just that we bought it jointly and I didn’t want Baz to end up with it. He only used it to keep those little vodka or champagne bottles in, you know, from when everyone used to stand at parties drinking through straws. But I’ve just got some stuff from the supermarket if you’d like …’
‘No. I’m not hungry.’ I withdrew my hand. ‘But I would like a cup of tea.’
She went on chattering and rummaging in cupboards for cups and tea bags.
‘Raspberry? Lemon and ginger? Peppermint?’
Gooseberry and leek. Tamarillo. Artichoke leaf.
‘Or there’s some ordinary.’
‘Ordinary would be good, thanks.’
When she opened the door of the TARDIS to take out the milk, I saw that it was empty except for a bottle of champagne and one of those pre-mixed packets of artful salad. We settled ourselves on a pair of steel-and-leather chairs at opposite sides of the kitchen table. Lisa lifted her cup, smiling at me again. She had grey eyes, neat features and lovely skin that seemed to have light shining through it like tissue paper stretched over a spotlight tube. I felt tired and colourless, and touched with envy. There was no point in envying youth, I reminded myself. It was a fact, vivid but perishable. You might as well be jealous of oranges.
‘Here’s to new neighbours,’ she said.
We drank to each other and then Lisa hitched her chin at our surroundings.
‘What do you think I should do with it?’
‘You could paint it all white.’
She gave this suggestion careful consideration, as if it was the most imaginative proposal she had ever heard.
‘Could do, yes.’ And then, with an abrupt switch of focus, ‘Are you married?’
I told her that I was and for how long, and that we had no children.
Lisa fixed her gaze on mine.
‘Do you mind not having children?’
‘I have learned to live with it.’
She stood up from the table and went to lean against one of the cupboards, and the TARDIS began a low humming as if preparing to relocate. When she moved, the curved wings of her shoulder blades shifted beneath her T-shirt and poignant knobs of bone showed under the skin at the nape of her neck. Her hair was pinned up today with a butterfly clip. She stood not quite looking at me, hesitating, and I waited for what she wanted to say. It was warm in the kitchen; Derek had this week fired up the big central heating boiler. We were snug in here. The heat and the hum of the refrigerator and the sense of enclosure that Dunollie Mansions always gave bred an impression of intimacy, as though Lisa and I were old friends who had momentarily lapsed into thoughtful silence.
‘I suppose that’s what you do. Learn to live with things, I mean. I wish I was any good at it. Can you learn?’
I shifted on my leather-and-steel perch. At once Lisa moved forward and poured more tea. She didn’t want me to leave yet, because she needed someone to talk to. I was a good choice, after all. I had gradually become someone who listened, rather than a creature who went out and did things.
I thought that Lisa Kirk was probably lonely. And that her loneliness might last as long as a nanosecond, before the next Baz came along.
‘Learn? I don’t know. It was just a lazy figure of speech. You accept what you are dealt, or you kick against it. The end result’s probably no different anyway.’
While she considered this Lisa groped on the floor beside her seat and found her handbag. She took out a packet of Silk Cut and lit one while I looked at the bag. It was made of chartreuse suede and shaped like a pineapple or maybe a hand grenade.
‘Like it? It’s my design. I make handbags, my own company. I’m opening a shop in Walton Street soon. We’re called Bag Shot.’
I had seen the name, possibly in a Vogue spread of witty accessories.
‘I do like it,’ I said truthfully. I was impressed. I would too readily have dismissed Lisa as merely a trust-fund babe or daddy’s girl, and now it turned out that she was a designer and a businesswoman.
She tipped the bag upside down and a heap of keys and lipsticks and ticket stubs fell out.
‘Here,’ she said and gave it to me.
I examined the cunning fastening of the hood and the bottle-green silk lining. The little golden label stitched to the inside said ‘Bag Shot by Lisa Kirk’.
‘It’s beautiful. You can’t just give it to me.’
‘Yes I can, I want to. God. Anyway, we were saying about learning to live with things, only it’s without in my case. Baz was my business partner, you know, he was the one who knew about start-ups and leases and money, and I just drew pictures of bloody handbags and chose stuff to get them made up in. We lived together as well, obviously. Ever since I was twenty-one. Work and play, me and Baz. And then it fell apart, like a piece of machinery suddenly worn out. He met a woman at a party, I was yakking and drinking but all the time I was really just across the room, frozen, watching them fall for each other like they were in a movie. And then, once that had happened, it got really difficult to go on working together, and … so.’ She spread out her hand, taking in the kitchen and the red refrigerator and ourselves, sitting facing each other across the table.
‘I see,’ I said. We sat in silence for a minute.
‘Baz’s new girlfriend is pregnant.’
‘Oh. When did all this happen?’
‘They met four months ago.’
‘That was quick.’
‘It was, wasn’t it?’
I clasped and unclasped the lid of the bag. ‘You know, you’ll find someone else. More quickly than you think, probably. I’m sure everyone tells you that. And you can find a new business partner too although that may be a bit more difficult. The requirements are more stringent.’
She smiled at that.
‘Maybe I won’t find anyone, on the other hand. I feel pretty useless.’
I told her what she probably expected to hear, that you don’t get your stuff featured in Vogue or fix yourself up in mansion flats in Kensington at her age if you are anything less them talented and able. We drank some more tea and talked a little about how Baz and she had worked together, and then about the flat and her plans to transform it once, as she put it, the shop was able to run itself around the block. She showed me round the rest of it and I saw that her bed – as narrow as a child’s – was in the little second bedroom that Peter and I used as an occasional spare room, and in the main bedroom with its good light was her drawing board, with big cork panels pinned with scraps of fabric and sketches and pages torn from magazines resting against the walls alongside it.
I thought of our tidy rooms below, static and silent at this time of day, and the way this web of Lisa’s uncertainty and tentativeness and peering into the future was exactly superimposed on them, not just on Mrs Bobinski’s. It made me feel as stiff as our decor.
We returned to the kitchen. Lisa picked up the bag and put it into my hands.
‘Thank you,’ I said.
She came with me to the front door and I looked through the diamond glass panels at the swimmy, distorted view of the hallway.
‘Would you like to have had children?’ she asked, with her hand on the latch.
I knew that she was only asking for whatever my answer might reflect on her own situation, on the baby her ex-lover was expecting that she believed should have been hers.
‘You’ll have a baby,’ I said as gently as I could. ‘You’ve got all the time in the world.’
‘But would you?’ she persisted, with the tactlessness of self-absorption.
I am used to deflecting these thoughts, but still I saw the pictures now, the queasy procession framed and frozen by the camera shutter, click, all the way back into history, click and click.
‘No.’
Her hand had dropped back to her side so I opened the door myself and stepped out into the hallway. We exchanged unspecific invitations to have a drink, or drop round for a kitchen supper. And then I went downstairs to the close air of our own flat where the supermarket carrier bags were waiting for me to attend to them.
Peter sat in his usual chair, with a whisky at his elbow. He had had a reasonable day, he said. Busy, and the Petersens people were a bunch of amateurs who couldn’t run a tap, let alone a software licensing programme, but nothing really to complain about.
‘And you?’
He looked across at me, arching his eyebrows behind the fine metal ovals of his spectacle rims. I told him about having tea with Lisa Kirk, and showed him the chartreuse hand grenade.
He examined it, inside and out.
‘Bit extreme, isn’t it? Do women really buy this sort of stuff?’
‘Yes, I think so. They probably pay about two hundred quid for it. She runs her own business and is about to open a shop.’
He puckered his lips in a soundless whistle, interested now. Peter was a management consultant, with expertise I couldn’t even guess at. He read and wrote reports in a language as impenetrable to me as Mandarin, and he too had a company, on the comfortable earnings from which we lived our sedate life in Dunollie Mansions. ‘Chalk and cheese,’ my mother said before we married, which was also not long before her early death from ovarian cancer. (My father and she separated when I was about twelve, and he married again and acquired a second family to which he and his new wife swiftly added. The Steps and Halves, my mother and I called them.)
Chalk and cheese Peter and I may have been, but we were determined to have each other. We were introduced by a photographer I knew who gave a drunken Christmas party in his studio, to which Peter was brought along more or less on a whim by the photographer’s agent. I remember looking across the room, through a sea of outlandish people who didn’t at the time look outlandish to me, and seeing his well-cut suit and the lights flickering off the shields of his glasses. He was the one who looked out of place in that company of Mapplethorpe boys and six-foot women. After a little while the photographer’s agent brought him across and introduced us.
‘Cary Flint, Peter Stafford.’
I remember that we talked about our fellow guests and a new book of our host’s pictures, and a Matisse exhibition we had both recently seen in the South of France. I had to work hard to sustain this cocktail party standard of chat. I was very thin at the time and taking a lot of pills, and felt speedy and mad. I was disconcerted by the way this man tilted his head towards me so as not to miss a word of my insane gabble, and I also saw the way that his hair fell forward over his temples and the mildness of his eyes behind his glasses, and my knees almost buckled with lust for him. The party was reaching its crescendo. Two boys were exchanging tongues under the ribs of the spiral staircase that also sheltered Peter and me. A procession of other models’ legs filed up and down past our ears and I noticed that he never even glanced at all this thigh and buttock because his eyes were fixed on me. I began to speak more slowly, although I had to shout over the noise, and all the time he watched my mouth with minute attention. Blood hummed in my ears, drowning the crashing music.