Time to Die

4

In Finchley, in North London, Kathy Reynolds poured another cup of tea for the woman from the property-letting company. Clarissa Morgan, she thought, was exceptionally helpful. Albion Services had been a real find. Other estate agents, other letting agencies, had proved utterly useless, in some cases worse than useless, when it came to finding a property. The level of incompetence she had encountered was shocking. Kathy was extremely efficient herself at her job and it caused her bewilderment when she came across people manifestly not up to doing theirs. She really didn’t see how hard it could be. They were estate agents, for heaven’s sake, not astrophysicists or surgeons. It was surprising really when they had all the relevant information, knew her price range and her requirements — single mother, one twelve-year-old child — the number of unsuitable properties she’d been offered, everything from penthouses suitable for single, wealthy bachelors to eight-bedroom houses or downright slums. Not so with Clarissa Morgan. Clarissa Morgan was a beacon of ability.

Kathy had known Clarissa would be good, ever since she first saw her bright, intelligent face under her short square-cut fringe of dark hair, and they’d become friends. An observer might have thought that Clarissa and Kathy could be used in some advertising campaign that required two Caucasian women who were physically virtual polar opposites.

Kathy was tall, blonde and slim. She looked, and was, reserved by nature. Time had etched fine lines on her face but she still had an exceptionally good figure, and she was aware that she was still extremely attractive. Peter, her son, had inherited her good looks. He was too young to think about girls but Kathy knew that before he was much older, he’d be in great demand. That wasn’t just a mother’s biased judgement; there was independent verification. Her friends frequently remarked upon it. He was exceptionally handsome.

If Kathy was ethereal, then Clarissa was earthy. She was stocky in build, dark-haired, swarthy. Kathy guessed, correctly, that she had to work hard to keep her weight down and her hair under control. She could, and did, wear bold colours, vivid nail varnish, scarlet lipstick. She wasn’t conventionally pretty, her figure was indifferent, but she’d played the hand she’d been dealt extremely well. Kathy knew that when Clarissa walked into a room or down a street, male heads would turn. She was sexy and she knew it. It was the aura she obviously liked to project. At first sight she wasn’t the kind of person Kathy naturally warmed to. Clarissa looked like the sort of woman who didn’t like women, but now Kathy felt she had misjudged her. Clarissa’s competence and friendliness had thawed her.

Albion, unlike the other agencies, had taken the time to draw up a detailed profile of her and her needs so they could find her the property she wanted, and Clarissa had even taken a keen interest in her twelve-year-old son, Peter, helpfully restricting the search to areas accessible from his school and to properties that fitted her price range. Kathy was immensely proud of Peter and, although she suspected that a healthy interest in your client’s children always made sense from a business point of view, Clarissa’s questions about Peter seemed inspired by genuine affection and concern. She’d even, with Kathy’s permission, put a picture of Kathy and Peter on her phone, in fact several pictures. ‘I like to show potential clients the kind of customers we have on our books,’ she explained. ‘Particularly women on their own. I’m a single woman myself and you can’t be too careful these days who you trust, especially when it comes down to really important things like where you live. Also who you meet. I’m very wary about male clients on their own until I’ve got to know them.’

Clarissa now leant back in her chair and sipped her tea. She’d called round to tell Kathy they were thinking about putting cable into the property and wanted to check that was OK with her. Kathy had hired the flat on a one-year lease while she considered her options. After her husband’s death and the sale of her South London house, she didn’t feel up to the strains of buying a property. It would have taken an energy she didn’t have. She didn’t want to think about anything important for the time being. This particularly went for house-hunting. The endless visiting, the wasted time, the depressing traipsing around other people’s houses, the brief, unwanted snapshots of their lives. Above all, she didn’t want to make any decisions. She looked at Clarissa and thought, when I decide to get a place, I’ll get her to find it for me. She’s someone I can trust.

Today Clarissa was looking Tatler-esque. She was wearing a well-cut jacket and skirt that looked expensive but not off-puttingly so. She had a silver ring with a large red rectangular-cut ruby on the ring finger of her right hand. It matched her lipstick. She asked, ‘So, how is Peter?’ She always asked after his welfare. She was very solicitous. She leant forward as she spoke. She had a husky, slightly emphatic, voice.

Kathy, who frequently had to make presentations to large groups of people and speak at conferences, had once paid for a couple of sessions of professional training from a voice coach who worked in the theatre. He had shown her how to project her voice, using her breath and the muscles at the base of her diaphragm to reach the back of a room. Clarissa did this, she had noticed. Vaguely, she wondered if Clarissa had received theatrical training too. She did look slightly stagey and had those mannerisms that Kathy associated with Peter’s drama teacher at school, deliberately overemphasized movements, particularly hand and arm gestures. She put the thought from her head, it was hardly relevant.

Kathy smiled and automatically looked at the school photo of Peter in his chorister’s robes. The school prided itself on its choir. She wondered, as she sometimes did, if he would keep his voice when it broke. His father had had a beautiful voice.

‘Getting over things,’ she said, in answer to Clarissa. ‘It’s like his dad said before he died, “I’m too old now for it to be a tragedy, just think of it as a bit of a shame”.’ She missed Dan, but above all she worried about how his death might affect her son. Would it make her too much of a clingy mother? Would it matter if her son didn’t have some sort of male role model? Luckily, she thought wryly to herself, I’m usually too busy to think about things like that, too busy to brood.

‘It must be difficult,’ said Clarissa in her caring voice, and looked at the family photos framed on the window sill. Kathy’s son was very good-looking, she had decided. Very good-looking indeed. She gently touched the small, horseshoe-shaped scar between her eyes. It was a habit she had when she was thinking.