The Dog Who Came In From The Cold

Chapter 23: Dee Lies to Caroline

Saturday was Caroline’s day for a long lie-in, but not that Saturday. She had not slept well the previous night, having gone to bed in a state of intense anger. Never let the sun set on your wrath – that was the motto in one of those preachy needlework samplers that her mother liked so much. Dignified with an ornate Victorian frame, it had hung in her room at home until, at the age of sixteen, she had hidden it in a cupboard and denied all knowledge of its whereabouts. Well, on Friday night, she had certainly forgotten the adage, or at least left it mentally sequestered in its cupboard, as she switched out her light in a state of unambiguous wrath, all of it directed against James.

How could he have forgotten their arrangement to have dinner together? It was not as if it had been made weeks, or even days, earlier; it had been concluded a few hours before it was due to take place. One did not forget obligations as freshly minted as that; one simply did not.

What had happened? Had he simply decided that he had something better to do? James would never behave with such discourtesy, and yet, when she tried to telephone him, she found that his mobile phone was turned off. The only time he did that, she knew, was when he did not want to hear from her. It had happened once or twice before, after a minor row or misunderstanding, and he had even admitted it.

“I can’t bear conflict, Caroline,” he explained. “I simply can’t. There are some people, you know, who like to fight with others – I’m not one of them. I’m really not.”

“But you can’t just turn off your phone,” she said. “That’s running away.”

“I’d never run away from you,” he said soothingly.

“You’d simply turn me off?”

He smiled. “Not you! But I must admit there are some people who really need an on–off switch. I can think of at least three. Maybe even more.”

The fact, then, that he had not answered his phone on Friday night pointed to only one conclusion – he had been avoiding her because he knew that he was standing her up. And even if the phone was off because the battery had run down, or he had simply forgotten, still he stood accused of thoughtlessness at the very least.

Unless something had happened. It was this thought that, more than anything else, ruined her sleep. There were many dangers in London. A traffic accident, for example – James was so unworldly and she had often had to grab his arm to prevent him from walking out into the traffic expecting it to stop. There was that, of course. She imagined herself standing in the police station while the police ran through a list of traffic incidents involving pedestrians. “An art historian, you say, Miss? Well, we did have a young man knocked down near the Courtauld …”

And there were other dangers. People simply disappeared in London. One moment they are on their way to a meeting with a friend and the next they are nowhere to be seen. What happened to these people, she wondered. They were abducted, she had read, but where to? And how did their abductors keep them once they had them? It would be difficult, surely, to imprison somebody in central London; there simply wasn’t the space.

James had no enemies – or none that Caroline knew of. He had not even written a critical review. It would be understandable if he had written something scathing about an installation artist, for instance; such a critic might suddenly find himself put into a tank of formaldehyde or something like that by the artist’s supporters. But James had never had anything published, not even a review.

Anger turned to anxiety, and then back to anger as yet another possibility suggested itself. James might have gone off with somebody else: while Caroline was waiting for him in Corduroy Mansions, he might have been in some entirely other part of London cavorting with somebody else. She tried to imagine James cavorting; she tried to imagine anybody cavorting. It was difficult. And if James had already expressed an antipathy to kissing others for fear of germs, then surely he would be highly unlikely to cavort. Cavorting, even if it was difficult to picture, was surely even more likely to pose a risk of contamination by germs. For a moment she pictured James in the arms of another woman, preparing to cavort … She put the thought out of her mind, only to have it replaced by a still more unsettling one. What if James had decided to go off for dinner with one of those rather foppish young men who hung about the auction houses? There was one who she was quite convinced was interested in James; she had seen him looking at him, in that way. James had said, “Oh, him, he’s not at all my type,” and laughed, but now the exchange came back in a most unsettling way.

She decided to get out of bed and make herself a reviving cup of coffee. She would not phone James, she thought; she would wait for him to phone her. And then she would be cool – no matter what effort it cost her. She could even pretend to have forgotten the engagement herself, which would be very satisfactory revenge – if he phoned to apologise and she asked him what he was talking about.

She went into the kitchen. Dee, who drank green tea first thing in the morning, was standing by the window, nursing a mug in her two hands.

“Go out last night?” asked Caroline.

Dee looked out of the window. “Yes.”

“Party?”

Dee shook her head. “No, nothing special. Just went out for a meal.”

Caroline thought that rather unlike Dee, who was perpetually moneyless. “Special occasion? By yourself?”

“Yes,” said Dee. “Just me. Private treat.”