The Perfect Girl

RICHARD

Once Chris has decided to stay for a bit longer while he waits for Grace to finish her nap, he asks to borrow my computer. ‘I just need to tie one or two things up for work so they don’t bother us for the next few days,’ he says. His face is grim and stressed.

‘Be my guest,’ I tell him.

I take him upstairs and show him the set-up in my office.

Could he have done something? I wonder again as I leave him to it. I have to resist the temptation to peer over his shoulder. Tessa has her suspicions, clearly, but that could just be guilt talking, because she is somehow convinced that she could have saved Maria if she’d made more effort to remain close to her after the marriage.

I notice as I cross the landing that we all left the bathroom in a somewhat destroyed state in the wake of Grace’s bath, and I decide that I’ll tidy it up, to make it nice for Tessa. I mop up the spilled water with the already wet bedspread, and then put it out in the hallway with the idea of hanging it up to dry in the garden, and I wash the dried-out bubbles from the inside of the bath.

As I scrub, I begin to feel confused about something I thought I overheard when Grace was having her bath. I thought I heard Lucas say something about Maria’s death, but I’m sure I must be wrong, or Zoe would have reacted differently when I spoke to her immediately afterwards.

I wonder if I’ll be able to persuade Chris to let Grace stay here for her tea. He’ll struggle to organise that in a hotel. I wonder if she eats soup. I wonder when she’s going to start missing her mother.

It appears that Grace has played with every plastic bottle that was gathered neatly around the edges of our bath, and so I begin to retrieve them from all corners of the room and stand them up in their allotted places. We’re not used to things moving around, Tess and I. Ours is a quiet life.

I’m kneeling on the floor to reach a shampoo bottle that has somehow got stuck behind the stand that the basin sits on when the craving hits me. First, a wave of exhaustion, then a rush of all the emotions that I cannot bear.

Beside me, built into the cladding that surrounds the bath, is a small door. If I push it, it’ll open, and behind it there’s a hidden bottle of vodka. Cheap, nasty vodka. Beautiful, anaesthetising vodka. Just one push of my fingers and I can have it.

But I try to be good. I sit there, on my knees, in our nice little bathroom, and think of that beautiful baby, and Tessa’s broken family, and of our shambles of a marriage, and although it takes me every ounce of strength, I manage to leave the room without touching the bottle.

Walking away is so hard. There’s some pay-off though, I can’t deny it, because as I make my way slowly downstairs I force myself to acknowledge that resisting the bottle is also a triumph of sorts, however grim I feel.