What to Do When Someone Dies

‘They’re very nice.’

‘Well, breasts don’t get the VAT done. And Christmas is coming at us like a train. Gwen, are you sure I can’t give you a job? Or a three-month contract to get us through this?’

I shook my head and tried to think of what Greg used to say about situations like this. ‘What you really need,’ I said, ‘is to know exactly where you are just now. What you owe, what you’re owed, what you’ve got, and what your plans are. We can sort that out in a couple of days and then you’ll be fine again.’

‘I wanted to be an artist,’ said Frances, ‘and when I met Milena, it was all going to be fun. We liked going to parties, we liked having parties, so why not do it as a living? And I could be an artist on the side. It didn’t turn out like that. You know how you never properly enjoy your own party? You always worry that the drink’s going to run out or that someone’s not happy? It’s like that all the time.’

‘Was it like that for Milena?’ I asked.

‘No,’ said Frances, with a sad smile. ‘Milena didn’t let the details get her down.’

‘The details are my job now,’ I said. ‘At least for the next few days.’

Somehow, when it isn’t your own life, it isn’t so hard. For two hours, I behaved like Frances’s view of an accountant. There was nothing magical involved, no smoke and mirrors, no cleverness. I just piled up pieces of paper that looked alike. I made lists of dates, which I also, surreptitiously, transferred to my own notebook, I checked receipts against bank statements. At eleven o’clock Beth arrived. I gave her a list of phone calls to make to check delivery dates. She was as shocked as if I had asked her to clean the drains. She pulled a face and glanced resentfully at Frances, but she did what I said.

Twenty minutes later, Johnny arrived; he nodded at me, then sat next to Frances and talked menus. I barely looked up. I was holding a lot of information in my head temporarily. If I spoke or thought about something else, even for a moment, most of it would dissipate and I would have to start again.

My sense of time was imprecise, but a short while later I felt a presence beside me. It was Johnny.

‘I’m a bit worried walking around here,’ he said, gesturing at the piles of paper circling my chair.

‘Then don’t,’ I said, frowning at the distraction.

‘This isn’t –’

‘Stop,’ I said, holding up my hand. I wrote down a date followed by an amount of money and then the VAT. Then I looked at him. ‘Yes?’ I said.

‘I was going to say that you’re doing all the boring bits of the job and none of the fun bits.’

I waved at the office. ‘That’s what seems to be needed,’ I said.

‘Whereas,’ said Johnny, ‘my own strategy is to do the fun bits and leave the boring bits to sort themselves out.’

‘That sounds like a recipe for going bankrupt.’

‘All restaurants go bankrupt in the end.’

‘That doesn’t sound much fun.’

‘It’s great,’ said Johnny, and added thoughtfully, ‘until the end. And then you start again. It’s got a sort of rhythm to it. But what I really wanted to say, really wanted to ask, in fact – you remember I mentioned my restaurant – was whether you might want to come over and I could show you the sort of food I do. Some time. Today or tomorrow or whenever.’

He was handsome in a louche sort of way, well dressed, a man who went bankrupt and didn’t let it get him down. He was perfect, in a certain fashion. Perfect if I wasn’t me – although, of course, the person he was talking to wasn’t actually me. ‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘Not at the moment. I’m not in the right place for that. In my life.’

‘Oh, no,’ he said, unruffled. ‘I wasn’t suggesting a date. I’m not harassing you. I just thought, as one professional to another, it would be interesting and useful for you to see the kind of food we do.’

‘I’ll think about it,’ I said. ‘My life’s a bit confusing right now, but I will think about it.’

In my own job, I had got used to scraping away at a chair, varnishing a chest, with no company but the radio, which drifted in and out of my consciousness. The Party Animals office was almost a public space, with people coming and going, packages being delivered, clients or potential clients dropping in. Sometimes the potential of the client seemed very vague indeed. I came to feel that Frances had exaggerated the degree to which she was burdened by the bureaucracy of the business. Much of the morning and the early afternoon disappeared in a series of long, loud conversations, on the phone or in person.

Some clients seemed to know Beth as well, and I saw a different side of her, a glow about her, confidence, as she flirted with the men or gossiped with the women. As I listened to her – and it was impossible not to – I came to realize I had entered a different world, a richer one than mine, with its own rules and standards and culture.

Of the visitors, several were smartly dressed women who seemed to have a lot of time on their hands. I might have felt a jab of resentment at this if I hadn’t forced myself into this situation. Anyway, the less Frances and Beth did, the more chance I had to learn something. I sat on the far side of the room, with my back to them, my head in my hands, covering my ears so that I could concentrate.

Shortly after three I heard a visitor come in. I was faintly surprised to hear a man’s voice and looked round, and was jolted.

It was Hugo Livingstone. A man I had seen just once, at the inquest. For a moment I was pointlessly and ridiculously angry: what on earth was he doing there? Then I cursed my stupidity. He was Milena’s husband. Wasn’t it natural for him to visit his dead wife’s office? Hadn’t I done the same thing myself? I tried to think of a way, any way, of getting out of the room without him seeing my face. I could crawl; I could climb out of the window. But I knew it wasn’t possible. All it would take was a glance. The idea of being seen, recognized and forced to attempt an explanation was so terrible that I felt feverish anticipating the nuclear explosion of exposure and embarrassment.

I tried to continue working or, rather, to make it look as if I was working. I bent over some papers as if I was scrutinizing them with particular attention. Other people had come and gone without paying me any heed. If I could just sit tight, maybe he’d go away. I tried to make out what he was after, but he was speaking in a mumble from which I could only hear the occasional word. There was no such problem with Frances. I heard murmurs of sympathy and talk about the chaos she was in, and then I knew what was coming.

‘Oh, that’s Gwen,’ she said. ‘She’s been an absolute treasure. She came from nowhere and she’s sorting things out. Gwen?’

Frozen in panic, I grasped for something, anything, that could prevent me having to turn round. There was no trap-door, no rope to climb, but my mobile phone was on the desk. Switched off, so nobody could ring me. I picked it up.

‘That’s right,’ I said into it. ‘Could you check it? Yes, it is urgent. Yes.’

I turned my head about half a degree and raised my free hand in a gesture much like the one I’d seen from Frances earlier. I hoped it meant, ‘Sorry, I’d love to be introduced, but I’m caught up in this absolutely crucial phone call and can’t possibly be disturbed.’ I decided I was talking to a builder who was doing some emergency work on my bedroom. I tried to picture him at the other end of the line so that I would seem more convincing. I continued to say yes and no, to murmur half-sentences. Even though I was becoming more and more used to living in a fantasy world, and now a fantasy world within a fantasy world, it still sounded pathetic and unconvincing to me.

In the gaps between my fatuous outpourings, I tried to listen to what Frances was saying. My fear was that she would tell him I had been a friend of Milena’s and then he really might stay, however long I remained on the disconnected phone, to find out how I knew her. But then Frances started talking about people I had never heard of, and after a few minutes more I heard footsteps, then the front door opening and closing. I made myself continue the conversation for a bit longer. ‘So we’ll talk about the colours when we meet?’ I said brightly, loudly. ‘That’s great. Maybe I’ll see you when I get back… Oh, you’ll be gone, then? All right, tomorrow. ’Bye.’

‘Everything okay?’ Frances said sympathetically.

‘It’s my so-called builder,’ I said. ‘You know how it is.’

I hoped desperately that Frances did know how it was, because I couldn’t bear to lie any more. There would be too much falsehood to fit into my brain. She just nodded. I don’t think she wanted to find out too much about my life.

I really was organizing the company’s papers. I wasn’t lying about that. But at the same time I was also jotting down every reference to where Milena had been on a particular day. If I compared it to the chart I had constructed for Greg, perhaps I could find somewhere they had been together, or nearly been, or a route that had crossed. It didn’t have to be a night in a hotel, it could be a train, a petrol station. Indeed, as I worked I decided I would stop off at the stationer’s on the way home for more card and coloured pens and that I would make a separate chart for Milena.

I worked with such concentration that when I heard Frances say my name it was as if I had fallen asleep and woken up to find the world dark.

She wasn’t alone. A man was standing with her, tall, distinguished, rich. He made me feel dishevelled and a little ill-at-ease. He must have been in his mid-fifties, with short dark-grey hair, silvering at the edges. He was wearing an overcoat with a navy blue scarf.

‘This is Gwen, my good fairy,’ said Frances, and once again I had to stop myself looking round to see where Gwen was. ‘This is my husband, David.’ He gave me a slightly wry smile and held out his hand. It was beautifully manicured but, then, everything about him looked beautifully manicured, his hair, his black leather slip-ons. His handshake was dry and limp.

‘David, you’ve got to persuade Gwen to stay.’

He regarded her coldly, then gave a small shrug. ‘Don’t you see how much you’re valued?’ he said, in a voice that managed to combine sarcasm with indifference.

‘It’s just a holiday for me,’ I said.

‘Funny sort of holiday,’ he said.

‘She’s a maths teacher,’ said Frances.

‘Oh,’ said David, as if that explained everything.

‘Time to go,’ said Frances. ‘But wait a second.’ She went to her desk and scribbled on something. Then she came back and handed me a cheque.

‘I can’t take this,’ I said.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I really can’t take it.’

‘Oh, I see,’ she said. ‘You mean the tax? David, could you give me your wallet, darling?’

He sighed and handed it over. She riffled through it, pulled out some notes and offered them to me. I wanted to say no but I thought that a person who comes and works for you, sorting out your office, then refuses any payment, stops looking like a saint and starts looking a bit creepy, maybe even suspicious. I took the money. ‘Thank you,’ I said.

‘Tomorrow?’ she said.

‘Tomorrow, at least,’ I said.

We left the house together.

‘You know how we all love you,’ said Frances.

‘Don’t be silly,’ I said.

‘I mean, Johnny completely adores her,’ she said to her husband, who smiled distantly and moved away from the hand she laid on his arm. I saw her wince as she registered the slight. She was too eager with him, I thought, and too anxious, while he treated her with something close to contempt. I felt a spasm of pity for Frances – a beautiful woman in her privileged life, yet she was clearly unhappy.

The old lady behind the counter at the Oxfam shop in Kentish Town Road seemed disconcerted when I gave her the banknotes and said I didn’t want to buy anything. She tried to make me take a dress or even a book, but I wouldn’t be persuaded and she reluctantly gave up. I left feeling as if I’d been shoplifting, but in reverse.

Chapter Fifteen

‘Do you think,’ I asked, ‘that it would be a good idea for me to go through Milena’s emails and check there aren’t any more nasty surprises waiting to jump out at you?’

Frances had just discovered that she and Milena had been expected at a client’s large house in Kingston upon Thames to discuss plans for her daughter’s wedding. Even from the other side of the room, I could hear the woman’s voice coming down the phone, high and irate.

‘Milena never mentioned it,’ said Frances, dejectedly, after she had ended the conversation and promised she would be there the following day. ‘She was supposed to write everything in the office diary.’

‘Can I see the diary?’ I asked. ‘Just to double-check things.’

‘Would you?’

I took the large, hard-backed book, which had a page for each day and was covered with scrawls, crossings-out, reminders, and tried to memorize appointments so I could cross-reference them with Greg’s chart, but I soon gave up. I’d have to write them down later.

Frances had no objection to me sifting through Milena’s messages, but the computer did. I found that to access her email I had to enter a password. ‘What was it?’ I asked Frances.

‘I haven’t a clue.’

‘Oh.’ I stared at the screen in frustration. I had this idea that the answers I needed were locked in that slim little box, if only I could find the key. Idly, I tried the names of her two step-children, with no success. ‘No ideas?’ I asked Frances.

She shrugged helplessly. ‘You could try her maiden name. Furness.’

‘No,’ I said, after a few seconds.

‘Her date of birth: the twentieth of April 1964.’

So she was forty-four, a decade older than me. I typed it in. Nothing.

‘She used to talk about a dog she had when she was a girl.’

‘What was its name?’

‘She never said. But, look, aren’t there ways round things like this?’

I couldn’t help smiling at that. ‘Probably, but if there were, do you really think I’d know about them?’

‘Oh, well, I guess we’ll just have to hope there aren’t other appointments waiting to be missed. In the meantime I need to get quotations on marquees before tomorrow morning.’

That day I had told Frances I needed to leave early. Even so, when I hurried up the road Gwen was waiting at my door, several carrier-bags at her feet. ‘Happy birthday!’ she said, kissing me on both cheeks. ‘But where’ve you been? I was worried you’d forgotten or got cold feet.’

‘Just trying to catch up with a few things,’ I said vaguely.

She looked at me curiously. ‘You’re being rather mysterious.’

I felt flustered. ‘I don’t mean to be. It’s just I’ve been having to sort out things, like – like money.’ Untrue, although, of course, that was what I should have been sorting out, and if I thought of my financial situation, I felt dizzy with anxiety.

‘Horrible for you,’ Gwen said sympathetically.

‘It’s got to be done.’ I fished my key out of my pocket. ‘Let’s get inside out of the cold. I’ll carry some of these. What’s in here? I thought you said just a few people.’ We went into the kitchen.

‘That’s right. Fifteen, twenty at most.’ She started unpacking the bag on to the kitchen table. ‘Hummus with pitta bread, and guacamole. I’ve bought the avocados for that. Tortilla chips with salsa, pistachio nuts. Nothing much to do except put them in bowls.’

‘What time is everyone coming?’ I was filled with panic. I was used to being Ellie-and-Greg facing the world together. I’d lost the ability to cope on my own – unless, that is, I was pretending to be someone else, in which case I seemed to be managing much better.

‘About six, six thirty.’

‘What shall I wear?’

‘Calm down. It’s just your friends. We’ll have a poke through your wardrobe in a moment, but it’s casual. People will be coming straight from work. You can wear what you’ve got on now, if you want.’

‘No,’ I said, with a sharpness that surprised even me. Because I was wearing my Gwen-clothes: my black trousers again, the stripy grey shirt, a sleeveless jersey over the top, and slouchy black suede boots. ‘I can’t wear these. I’d feel all wrong.’

‘I’ve got something for you,’ Gwen said. ‘A birthday present.’ She held out a small packet. ‘Go on, open it.’

I tore off the wrapping paper and found a little box. Inside there was a plain silver bangle. ‘It’s beautiful.’ I slid it over my wrist and held up my arm so Gwen could admire it.

Her face changed, but not in the way I’d expected. ‘Ellie, you’ve taken off your wedding ring.’

I felt a terrible flush spreading over my face and down my neck as we stared at my bare finger. ‘Yes,’ I said finally.

‘Is that because –’

‘I don’t know why,’ I said. ‘It’s in my purse. I might put it back on. Shall I?’

‘God, Ellie, I don’t know. We’ll talk about it when everyone’s gone home. Now we’re going to choose your clothes.’

In the end I dithered and fretted in front of the mirror until Gwen chose for me: jeans and a thin white shirt that was quite new and I’d never worn because it was too nice, too crisp and clean, and I was always saving it for a special occasion. I brushed my hair and piled it on top of my head. ‘There, will that do?’

‘You look gorgeous.’

‘Hardly.’

‘No, you do. I invited Dan. Is that all right?’

‘Who’s Dan?’

Gwen blushed deep crimson. ‘Someone I met.’

‘That’s great,’ I said. ‘As long as Dan knows how lucky he is to be invited by you.’ Gwen didn’t have much luck with men. I always told her she was too good for them and, in a way, it was the truth. Men, I thought grimly, go for women like Milena, who treat them badly, who don’t care. It’s caring too much that’s our downfall.

The doorbell rang.

‘Who’s that? Is it time already? I wish it was nine o’clock and everyone had gone home and it was just you and me again, discussing how it went. And Dan, of course.’

‘It’ll be Joe. He said he’d arrive early with the drink.’

Sure enough, it was Joe, his car parked by the pavement with the boot open. He gave me a bear-hug; his stubble scratched my cheek and his overcoat itched against my skin. ‘How’s the birthday girl?’

‘Doing fine.’

‘Right, I’ll put it in the kitchen, shall I? Twelve bottles of champagne – well, sparkling wine, to be honest. Twelve bottles of red.’

‘That’s twenty-four bottles, Joe!’

‘You can keep the rest for later. Let’s open a bottle now, shall we?’

He peeled off the foil and wire and eased the cork out of a champagne bottle, letting the foam rise out of its mouth and subside. Then he poured three glasses, which we lifted and chinked together. ‘To our dear Ellie,’ he said.

‘To Ellie,’ said Gwen, grinning at me fondly.

Why did I feel so much like crying? Why did my eyes sting and my sinuses ache and a block of sorrow lodge in my throat?

People arrived in dribs and drabs, and then a small flood, leaving umbrellas in the hall, tossing overcoats over the banister and on the back of the sofa. Soon my little house was full of people. They were in the living room, in the kitchen, sitting on the stairs. They’d all brought presents: whisky, biscuits, plants, earrings, a little ceramic bowl. Josh and Di arrived with a rocket that they set up in readiness in the garden, even though the instructions said it had to be fifty metres away from any building.

These are my friends, I thought, and this is my life now. Fergus was a bit subdued but very sweet and affectionate, Joe was in expansive mood, throwing his arms around people, pouring too much wine into their glasses. Gwen was talking to Alison, but glancing surreptitiously at her watch every few minutes because Dan had not yet turned up. Mary had cornered Jemma and was telling her what to expect from childbirth in every agonizing gory detail. Laurie and Graham were playing chess in the corner. I went from group to group with a bottle in my hand. That way I didn’t have to stay with anyone for long: just enough time to say hello and kiss them before I moved away. I didn’t drink and I didn’t talk to anyone properly – and no one mentioned Greg. He was the ghost in the house.

At seven thirty – just after Gwen had answered the door and returned, shy and pink, with a man I assumed to be Dan – Joe clinked his fork against a glass and stood on a rather flimsy chair, which creaked ominously beneath his weight. ‘Gather round,’ he roared.

‘Oh, no.’

‘Don’t worry, Ellie, this isn’t a speech, just a toast.’

‘Good.’

‘You don’t know what Joe means by “toast”,’ warned Alison, standing beside me.

‘No, really – all I wanted to say was you’ve had a terrible time and I know I can speak for everyone when I say that we’re always here for you, through thick and thin. Happy birthday, Ellie.’

‘Happy birthday,’ came the ragged chorus.

‘Speech!’ someone shouted.

‘Just… thank you,’ I said. ‘All of you.’

‘More wine,’ commanded Joe.

‘Here.’ At the other end of the room, Fergus pulled a cork out of a bottle and a spume of froth flowed over its neck and on to the small table by the window. ‘Oh, shit, I’ve spilt it – what is this, anyway?’

‘Oh,’ I said, cursing myself for not having put it away. ‘That’s – Well, it’s my chart.’

Fergus bent over it, dabbing at the wine with his sleeve. ‘It’s very colourful. Is it work?’

‘No.’ I hesitated. ‘Actually, it shows where Greg was during the last few weeks of his life.’

‘Seriously?’

‘Yes.’

‘Fuck, Ellie.’ He seemed dazed. ‘It’s amazing. It must have taken for ever. But why?’

‘Because…’ I was glad I hadn’t put out Milena’s chart: it was still a work in progress.

‘What is it?’ Jemma had joined us and so, a few minutes later, had most of the others in the room.

‘There’s almost no time unaccounted for!’ Josh sounded either impressed or scared, I couldn’t tell which.

I took a deep breath. These were my friends, after all, and suddenly it seemed important to make a public declaration. ‘I did it because I wanted to work out when Greg would have been with that woman. And you see…’ I waved at the chart ‘…he wasn’t. There are barely any gaps. He simply didn’t have the time.’

I stared at them. Nobody was smiling or nodding; everyone was looking at me gravely, or with embarrassment. ‘So, something else was going on,’ I said ominously, hearing my words fall into the silence. ‘Something bad.’

‘Bad?’

‘I think he was murdered.’

You could have heard a pin drop.

‘Let me pour you some wine,’ said Joe at last, taking the bottle from Fergus.

‘No, thanks. You all think I’m mad, I can tell.’

‘No!’ said Fergus. ‘We think you’re…’ I could see him searching for the right word ‘… tremendously loyal,’ he concluded. Jemma, beside him, nodded urgently.

‘I made a cake,’ Mary said, into the awkwardness. ‘Is now the right time to cut it?’

Everyone made over-enthusiastic noises; I blew out the symbolic candle on top of the coffee and walnut sponge, then slid in the knife.

‘It’s bad luck if we hear it touch the plate,’ warned Di, just as the knife audibly clinked against the china.

‘Fuck that,’ said Joe, scowling at her as if she was a criminal. He wrapped an arm round my shoulders. ‘It’s only good luck from now on,’ he said, kissing the top of my head.

‘Do you think I’m mad?’

‘Not mad. Sad.’

‘And a bit of a party-pooper.’

‘Meet Dan,’ said Gwen, appearing beside me. ‘Dan, this is Ellie.’

He was big and shy, with a quiet, rumbling voice. I liked him at once for the way he looked at Gwen.

‘Josh is about to light the rocket,’ said Gwen, tucking her arm through mine. ‘Come out and see it, and then I’ll send everyone home. Right?’

‘Right,’ I agreed, for suddenly I felt desperately tired and dejected. And lonely, too – lonelier now, in this crowd of too-eager friends, than I ever did when I was alone.

‘But I’ll stay and clear up. We can get a takeaway or something if you want. So steer clear of that cake for the moment.’

That was the best bit of the party: after everyone had left and the glasses were washed, the empty bottles put out for collection, sitting at the kitchen table with Gwen and her nice new man, eating curry out of foil cartons and not having to make an effort any more. There aren’t many people you can just be silent with.

At several points, I nearly told Gwen I had stolen her name and was passing myself off as an unsettled-maths-teacher-turned-office-assistant to the business partner of the woman who had died alongside Greg. But I stopped myself. It made me sound crazy.

Chapter Sixteen

After Gwen and Dan had left, I did the last of the washing-up and took out a bin-bag full of slimy, smelly party relics. I made a mug of tea and put the TV on, and by the time I got to bed it was after two. It didn’t matter because the next day was Saturday. My plan, if it could be called a plan, was to sleep until I woke and then to go back to sleep. If I left my bed it would be to eat and then I would return to my state of hibernation. Instead, I was woken from strange dreams – grey, hard-edged, dark, slow – by the doorbell. I pulled on a dressing-gown and went down the stairs, muttering to myself like a bag-lady. I was expecting to have to sign for something but instead I found Fergus on the doorstep.

‘Did I wake you?’ he said.

I was still fuddled with sleep. ‘Did you forget something?’

‘No, nothing like that,’ he said.

‘What time is it?’

‘Breakfast time,’ he said, smiling. ‘Can I come in?’

I was genuinely tempted to say no and slam the door. But I stood aside for him, then went upstairs, had a shower and tugged a pair of jeans up over my tired, pale legs. I put on an old sweatshirt of Greg’s and found some slippers in the back of a cupboard. I could already smell coffee.

When I came down to the kitchen Fergus had cleared the kitchen table and laid out mugs and plates. ‘I found a muffin in the freezer,’ he said. ‘I’m defrosting it. Unless you want bacon and eggs.’

‘I don’t even want a muffin,’ I said.

‘Of course you do,’ he said. He took the muffin from the microwave and spread it with butter, then raspberry jam, and put it on a little side plate and gave it to me. He poured a mug of coffee for me and one for himself. He sat down opposite me.

‘Am I that bad?’ I said.

He smiled and sipped his coffee. I felt cross and tired and blurry, and his insistent cheeriness was irritating, like music playing too loudly. ‘We’ve been having a conference,’ he said.

‘We?’

‘The usual suspects. I was the one delegated to come and see you. Well, I delegated myself, really.’

‘It’s the chart, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘I should have put it in a cupboard.’

‘We’ve not been looking after you properly,’ he said.

‘Everyone’s been looking after me,’ I said. ‘You came to my birthday party. I’ve been invited to dinner. People have put up with my deranged behaviour.’

‘You’ve not been deranged,’ said Fergus.

‘I’m just going through the stages of mourning: anger, bargaining, denial. Lots of denial.’ I paused. ‘Are they really the stages of mourning or are they the stages of dying? It doesn’t matter. I think I’ve had enough help. Maybe it’s time now to help myself.’

‘I’m not allowed to take no for an answer,’ said Fergus.

‘Says who?’

‘Says me and Gwen and Joe and Mary and no doubt other people as well.’

‘This is since the party?’ I said.

‘Some of it was at the party. But the lines have been buzzing as well.’

‘I wish people would just talk to me.’

‘I am talking to you.’

‘So what’s the plan? Is someone going to take me to the seaside? Are you clubbing together to pay for a massage?’

‘You shouldn’t be sarcastic,’ said Fergus. ‘It’s the lowest form of wit. The immediate plan is for you to eat your muffin, then show me round your house.’

‘You know what it looks like.’

‘Please, eat up.’

I nibbled at the muffin, feeling like a child who had been told off. It was dry in my mouth, hard to swallow. ‘I don’t need all this help,’ I said. ‘I shouldn’t need it. He was your friend. You knew him much longer than I did. Losing him must have been as bad for you as it was for me, maybe worse.’

Fergus looked reflective. ‘I don’t think I’ll ever have a friend like him again. I couldn’t. It was something about who’d seen me drunk and being embarrassing, at my low points.’ He smiled. ‘And there were good things as well. Trips, girlfriends… Well, I probably shouldn’t go there. Anyway, this isn’t a competition.’

‘I should be looking out for you,’ I said.

‘First things first,’ said Fergus. ‘That’ll do. That’s enough muffin. Let’s go upstairs.’

As I walked upstairs with him, I suddenly remembered being about seventeen and my mum coming into my bedroom. ‘You’re meant to have tidied your room,’ she would say.

‘I have tidied it,’ I’d say.

‘Well, it doesn’t look like it.’

And so it would go on. It seemed to me that I had spent days and days dealing with my affairs, sorting out Greg’s stuff, generally getting things ordered, but as I saw my bedroom, the junk room and the spare bedroom through Fergus’s eyes, I had to admit that it didn’t look like it. If there are stages of mourning, there are also stages of tidying. The first stage is your basic untidiness. The second stage is deciding to do something about it. The third stage involves getting everything out of the drawers, cupboards and shelves so you can see what you have to deal with it. The third stage necessarily looks much worse than the first. I wasn’t sure about the fourth because I hadn’t yet got to it.

There were piles of Greg’s clothes in the bedroom. The spare room functioned as a sort of office. It had a nice view over the garden towards the plane tree that stood next door. We had never made it a proper office because we’d been going to make the junk room into an office and turn the spare room into a nursery, put up silly wallpaper with clowns on it or something like that. The spare bedroom and the landing were piled high with files, papers, folders and books, some of which were connected with Greg’s work. ‘It looks bad, I know,’ I said. ‘I’m in the process of getting it sorted.’

There was so much I couldn’t say, starting with the supposed excuse that one of the reasons I hadn’t cleared up the house was that I had been down in Camberwell, sorting out Milena Livingstone’s office.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I’ve already heard about this from one of my spies.’

‘Who was it? I bet it was Mary. If I live to be a hundred and spend the entire time doing housework, I’ll never live up to her standards of cleanliness.’

‘I’m not saying,’ said Fergus. ‘I’m not able to reveal my sources. What I can do is tell you the plan.’

‘The plan?’

‘Are you at home today?’

‘I hadn’t thought of going anywhere.’

‘Good. You might have some visitors.’

‘Who are they? What are they going to do?’

‘I think you’ll recognize them. What they’ll do, basically, is help you deal with this. Some of it they’ll do on site, as it were, but mainly we don’t want to be in your hair. We can take things away, sort them out. If you trust us, that is.’

I stepped forward and put my arms around him and my face into his shoulder, the way babies do when they’re held. I couldn’t see his expression. It might have been horror, for all I knew, but I felt his arms go round me. I stepped back.

‘This is lovely of you,’ I said, ‘lovely of you all. But it’s something I should be able to do myself. And it’s not just that. I want to sort this out, Fergus, obviously I do. But what I don’t want is to have Greg surgically removed from my life. I want his stuff around me. Not necessarily in piles on the floor. But for me to move on, I don’t need to have all this stuff taken out of the house and dumped in a skip.’

‘That’s not what it’s about. We just want to help you deal with it. If it’s a matter of privacy, if you don’t want us nosing through your things, then just say so and we’ll back off.’

‘That’s not what I mean. There’s nothing I want to hide from you guys. It’s too late for that. It’s just that I should be able to deal with it myself. It feels wrong.’

‘It shouldn’t,’ said Fergus. ‘Let us do it for you. When Jemma finally gives up on me, you can do the same for me.’

A horrible thought occurred to me. ‘Is there anything you’re not telling me?’ I asked. ‘Do you all think I need help? I mean psychiatric help.’

Fergus laughed and shook his head. ‘Just us. Honest.’

It still felt uncomfortable to have been talked about, as if a conspiracy had been hatched against me. An hour later Joe, Gwen and Mary arrived, looking a bit sheepish. I told them I felt terrible. This was their weekend. Didn’t they have obligations, people to be with? They hugged me and made apologetic sounds. I wasn’t sure whether it was more difficult to receive help or to give it. I made more coffee and we went upstairs to survey the chaos. There was some discreet muttering.

Joe gave me a friendly nudge. ‘It’s not so bad,’ he said. ‘Just think of it as some decorating that needs doing and we’ve come round to hang wallpaper and paint.’

‘Do you want me to show you what everything is?’ I asked.

‘What we want,’ said Gwen, ‘is for you to go out and do some shopping or have a swim, anything, and we’ll go through everything, and some of it we’ll put in boxes and take away. In a couple of days we’ll bring it back and then, at least, we’ll have been able to sort out one bit of your life. We hope.’

I thought for a moment.

‘I feel I should say no to all this, or feel resentful, but really it’s such a relief.’

‘Then go away,’ said Mary, and I did, though not before I’d rolled up Milena’s chart-in-progress and put it into my bag. There are some things even friends shouldn’t know about.

I swam in the public pool, washed my hair in the showers afterwards and put on some clean clothes. I found a café, ordered a pot of tea and read the newspaper. I walked up Kentish Town Road and bought vegetables and salad. When I got home, they had left. I went upstairs and it was miraculous. Almost everything was gone and everything that wasn’t had been arranged neatly on a shelf or a desktop. Someone must have found the vacuum-cleaner as well, made my bed and done the washing-up. There was nothing for me to do but make myself a salad, then clear up thoroughly after myself, in case someone came back to check.

The next morning Joe rang. He’d gone through Greg’s work stuff and most of it could be dealt with at the office. Anything personal he would drop back later in the week. There was nothing urgent. In the afternoon Gwen came round with a pile of files under her arm, all household papers. She had gone through them, reordered them and, on a piece of paper, she had written a ‘to do’ list: people to be phoned, bills to be paid, letters to be written. She had drawn a star next to the ones that needed to be dealt with immediately. She was being Gwen to me in the way that I was being Gwen to Frances, but I couldn’t tell her that.

I didn’t check my mobile phone the entire weekend. On Sunday evening I phoned Frances and told her I wouldn’t be in on Monday. I wasn’t sure I would ever be in again, but I didn’t say so. On Monday morning I went into the workshop, put on the CD player with something baroque, and began to attend to that man’s rocking-chair. I sanded it down with far too much care, not because I wanted the job to be perfect but because I found it reassuring to be doing something so physical and precise that I couldn’t think about anything else. Almost automatically, in a dream, I continued with the job, and when I woke from the dream, the chair was there, finished and perfect, almost too beautiful to part with.

When I got into the house, I rang the owner of the rocking-chair and said that, after all, I had found time to mend it for him, and he could collect it whenever he wanted. Then I had a long bath and afterwards I remembered I hadn’t checked my answering-machine, as if I’d wanted to keep the world away, just for the moment. There was a message from Fergus. I rang him.

‘Are you home?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘For the next ten minutes?’

‘Yes.’

He hung up. I’d barely got dressed when the doorbell rang. It was Fergus, but he was different from when I’d seen him in the same spot on Saturday morning, distracted, not meeting my eye. He walked straight past me and into the living room. He sat on the sofa and I sat beside him. Without speaking, he took something from his pocket and placed it on the low table in front of us. It resembled a large narrow playing card.

‘I think you should look at that,’ he said.

Chapter Seventeen

It’s funny, the things you notice. Your brain can’t stop working. When I picked the card up and turned it over, my hands were shaking but, even so, I saw it was a menu with the date – 12 September – scrawled across it. There was a choice between goat’s cheese and walnut salad or watercress soup for starter, followed by either sea bass with roast Jerusalem artichokes or Welsh lamb with mashed sweet potato and steamed baby vegetables. Then, for dessert, chocolate fondant or fruits of the forest. I saw all of this, even as I was reading the bold handwritten message across the top. ‘Darling G, you were wonderful this evening. Next time stay the night and I can show you more new tricks!’ I didn’t have to read the signature to know who had written it: I had spent days looking at the handwriting on bills, receipts, business letters.

I laid the menu back on the table, face down.

‘Ellie,’ Fergus began.

‘Wait,’ I said. I stood up and went to the chest where I’d put the chart. I took it out, unfolded it and examined the grid for 12 September. An hour and twelve minutes was unaccounted for. At first I thought this was an amazing coincidence but quickly I realized it wasn’t a coincidence at all, because that’s the way reality fits together. I folded the chart and put it back in the drawer, then came to sit beside Fergus again.

‘Where was it?’ I asked him. My voice sounded quite calm. My hands were no longer trembling.

‘Inside one of his running books. I was going through them this afternoon. Jemma said I shouldn’t clutter up the house. I feel dreadful, Ellie. Was I right to show you?’

I gazed at him, although it was as if I was trying to see him through a fog. ‘You were quite right.’

‘I’m so sorry, Ellie.’

‘Thank you,’ I said politely, and folded my hands in my lap. I looked at the fingers laced together and thought I would be keeping my wedding ring off my finger after all.

‘You were wonderful, the way you trusted him.’

‘I did, didn’t I?’

‘At least you know now.’

‘That’s true.’

‘Can I get you a cup of coffee?’

‘No, thank you.’ He looked so wretched that I forced myself to make an effort. ‘This must be really horrible for you, Fergus. But I’m glad you told me. It would have been terrible not to. I’m grateful.’

‘He was a fool. An idiot. But he loved you, Ellie, I know he did. You mustn’t forget that.’

‘It’s nice of you to say so. If you don’t mind, I’d quite like to be alone now, Fergus.’

He stood up, and I remained where I was, so that he had to bend down awkwardly to kiss me on both cheeks.

‘I’ll phone later,’ he said.

After he had gone, I continued sitting on the sofa with my hands clasped together. I don’t know how long I stayed like that, or what I thought about. Perhaps those words: ‘I’ll show you more new tricks.’ What kind of love note was that, with its tacky and teasing suggestiveness, as if Greg was a circus pony and she the ring-master with the whip and black boots? I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to stop the images that were flooding through me. Perhaps I thought how extraordinarily, stunningly and flawlessly good he had been at keeping it secret from me, like a professional spy. Perhaps I thought it didn’t make sense, or that it made perfect sense, at last.

Finally I stood up and pulled out the chart again, staring at the gap in the schedule that I could now fill in: Greg was with Milena. I unrolled her much less filled-in chart as well. Nothing for 12 September there either. So. She had wanted him to stay the night next time. Had he? I couldn’t see when he would have done, but neither could I see why it should matter any more. I had the evidence I’d been searching for and dreading. As clearly as if she was in the room, I heard Mary’s voice: ‘Now you can get on with the rest of your life.’

Right. I stood up abruptly and went upstairs into our bedroom; into my bedroom. I opened the wardrobe and pulled out Greg’s handful of smart shirts, most of which I’d given him over the years, and his jackets. They would do for a start. I had been going to share them out among friends but now that didn’t feel right. On my way downstairs, I grabbed his old towelling robe from the back of the door. I wouldn’t be snuggling up in it on a cold evening any more.

In the garden, I bundled them into a pile and put a match to them. You’d have thought clothes would burn easily, but not those. It was nearly dark, and it was drizzling, which didn’t help matters – and the neighbour on the right, who had once complained to us about our loud music, was looking at me inquisitively while he put vegetable peelings on to his compost. I went into the shed, took paraffin from the top shelf and splashed a bit over the damp pile. I didn’t even need to add another match; an ember must still have been glowing in the folds of a jacket, because there was a bang, a ‘Whoa!’ from over the fence, and a violent orange flame roared several feet into the air. I could smell burning and realized my hair was singed. Who cared? Who cared what the neighbour thought, or his wife, who had now been summoned to watch the scene that was taking place? Who cared that acrid clouds of smoke were now rising from my fire, and petals of ash were floating in the air? Not me. I threw on his lovely leather brogues. They made a terrible smell. As I watched them blacken, I had a sudden picture of Greg buffing them with a soft cloth, that look of concentration on his lovely face, and wanted to rush forward and rescue them, but it was too late for that.

The elation had drained away and I felt empty, bleak, grim, defeated. Tired of the whole sorry business, of being angry, being ashamed, being sad, being lonely. Being me.

Perhaps that was why I returned to Frances’s the following morning. Because there, for a time, I wouldn’t have to be me. I could be Gwen: practical, calm and in control, helping other people sort out the mess of their lives. The previous night I had gone to bed early, without eating anything and hugging a hot-water bottle because although it was not a particularly cold evening I felt chilly and shivery. I lay there, wide-eyed, in the darkness. I wanted to cry, in the same way that sometimes, when I feel horribly nauseous, I want to be sick, but the tears didn’t come, wouldn’t. Several times, I had heard the phone ring and voices leave messages: Fergus, Gwen, Joe, Gwen again. They must have heard on the grapevine. Soon everyone would know.

It took me a long time to choose what to wear. I tried on skirts, tops, different shoes. I stood in front of the mirror, examined myself critically and didn’t like what I saw. I was pale; there were tired smudges under my eyes; my hair hadn’t been cut for months and was long and wild. In the end I put on a dress that looked a bit like a pleated chocolate-coloured sack, ribbed tights and my only pair of boots, although one of the heels was a bit loose. I put an amber pendant round my neck, because Greg hadn’t given it to me, and tied my hair back into a messy bun. I put on muted eye-shadow, eye-liner, mascara, lip-gloss. Finally, when it was after eleven o’clock and a pale sun had come out from behind the clouds, I looked enough like somebody else to venture out of the house.

For a moment I thought Frances was going to hug me, but she contented herself with a hand on my shoulder and a warm, relieved smile.

‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Sorry about yesterday.’

‘I’m just pleased you’re here now. Come downstairs. Johnny’s made us a pot of coffee.’

‘Johnny?’

‘Yes. Listen, I need you to do me a favour. Anyway, it’ll be more interesting for you than just trawling through the papers.’

‘What is it?’ I asked. Trawling through the papers was exactly what I wanted to do: I hadn’t finished with Milena Livingstone yet. Her chart was incomplete. My need to know about her had not been extinguished by that single coarse message scrawled so carelessly on the back of one of her menus. Now I wanted to know why – why had Greg fallen for her? What did she have that I didn’t?

‘I’ve got to dash out.’ She waved her hand vaguely in the air. ‘Crisis. But I’d promised Johnny I’d go to sample some of his suggested dishes, make the final choices. You can go instead of me.’

‘Wouldn’t it be better if Beth did it?’

Frances frowned. ‘Beth isn’t here yet. Besides, she doesn’t deserve it.’

‘I don’t know anything about food.’

‘You eat, don’t you?’

‘Kind of.’

‘Then it’ll be a treat for you. Are you hungry?’

I tried to remember when I’d last eaten a proper meal.

‘Good. That’s settled, then,’ said Frances, as if she had read my mind.

Johnny arrived with the coffee. He kissed me on one cheek, then the other, and said I was looking lovely. I stammered something and caught Frances’s amusement and something else. Tenderness?

Johnny’s restaurant was in Soho, down a little side alley. I knew it must be exclusive because it was almost impossible to spot from the street. The dining room was small, maybe ten tables, only one of which was unoccupied as we came in. With its low ceilings and deep-red wallpaper, it had the air of being someone’s private house rather than a public place. There was the hum of conversation, the chink of cutlery on china; waiters padded through, hovering deferentially over diners, pouring the last of the wine from bottles into glasses.

‘Nice,’ I commented.

‘They’re all here on expense accounts,’ Johnny said dismissively. ‘They don’t even taste what they’re eating. Why do we bother?’

‘Shall I sit here?’ I gestured to the single empty table.

He shook his head and whisked me through the door at the back and suddenly I was in an entirely different world, a brightly lit space of gleaming stainless-steel surfaces and scrubbed hobs. It was like a laboratory where men and women in white aprons bent over their work, occasionally calling instructions or pulling open vast drawers to reveal ingredients. I stared around me in fascination. Johnny pulled out a stool and sat me down at the end of a counter. ‘I’ll give you some things to try.’

‘Am I meant to choose the menu for Frances?’

‘No, I’ve already decided it.’

‘Then what am I doing here?’

‘I thought you were sad. I’m going to look after you. Wait.’ He disappeared through a small swing door and returned holding a large glass with a tiny amount of gold liquid in the bottom. ‘Drink this first.’

I took an obedient sip. It was sweet, pungent, like apricots.

‘Now, some soup. Radek, soup for the lady here!’

It didn’t come in a bowl, but a tiny teacup, and was frothy like cappuccino. I drank it slowly, finishing it with a teaspoon. ‘What is it?’

‘Do you like it?’

‘It’s delicious.’

‘Artichoke.’

Lunch came in miniature portions: a sliver of sea bass with wild mushrooms, a single raviolo sitting in a puddle of green sauce in the middle of a huge bowl, a square inch of lamb on a spoonful of crisped potato, a thimbleful of rice pudding with cardamom. I ate very slowly, in a dream, while around me the bustle gradually died down as the restaurant emptied and the kitchen filled with racks of washed plates and glasses. Johnny fussed over me, wanting my approval. The mess of my life receded; in this warm space I felt I need never venture to be Ellie again.

‘I’ve never eaten like this in my entire life,’ I said, over strong black coffee and a bitter chocolate truffle.

‘Is that in a good way?’

‘I feel looked after,’ I said.

‘That’s what I wanted.’ He put a hand on my shoulder. ‘What is it, Gwen?’

Our eyes met. For a moment, I so badly wanted to tell him the truth that I could feel the words in my mouth, waiting to be spoken. Then I shook my head, smiling at him. ‘Everyone has their sad days,’ I said. ‘You’ve cheered mine up.’

‘That was what I wanted.’ His hand was still on my shoulder. ‘Tell me something, please.’

‘What?’

‘Is there anyone?’

‘There was,’ I said. ‘For a long time there was. But not any more. That’s all over now.’

I felt so sad as I said the words. Cocooned in sadness, tiredness, food, warmth and the admiration of this nice stranger.

I let him take me home. Not to my home, of course, but his: a flat near the restaurant, up two flights of stairs and looking out on to a street market that was just packing up. It wasn’t out of desire but need, and the sheer, raw, monumental loneliness that had engulfed me: to be held as the day faded, to be told I was lovely. I shut my eyes and tried not to think of Greg’s face, tried not to remember and compare.

Afterwards, when he tried to hold me, stroke my hair, my body wouldn’t let me stay still. I got out of bed and dressed with my back to him, so I couldn’t watch him watching me. An hour later, as I opened my front door, I felt a sudden unease, as if the house itself would be angry with me for what I’d done.

Chapter Eighteen

‘What was it like with Johnny?’ asked Frances.

I looked up from some files and wondered if she could see my cheeks going red. Had he blabbed? ‘What do you mean?’

‘The food,’ she said. ‘What did you think?’

‘It was fine,’ I said.

‘Just fine? Is that all?’

‘It was good,’ I said. ‘It was really nice.’

‘Details, details,’ said Frances. ‘I need to know everything.’

Frances poured a cup of coffee for me and one for her, and I went through every dish Johnny had served me, describing its appearance, its texture. Under Frances’s intense questioning I was forced to recall the ingredients, the garnishes, the presentation. And as I talked, she leaned forward, her lips parted, as if she was tasting the food in her imagination. I suddenly saw her as a hungry woman – not just for the meals I was describing, but for intimacy, affection.

‘Mmm,’ she said, when I’d finished. ‘Lucky you. Do you think it’s stuff we can use?’

‘It might be a bit ornate,’ I said.

‘Ornate is good,’ she said.

‘Johnny never showed me a menu, but I guess it’s expensive.’

‘That’s the whole point,’ said Frances, briskly. ‘You’ve been looking through the bills, haven’t you? In the bonus season, the problem for most of our clients is finding things that are expensive enough. And that look expensive as well, without being vulgar. But you know that. What I really wanted to talk to you about was Johnny. Did you see him at work in the kitchen?’

‘That was where I ate.’

‘On a first date?’ said Frances.

‘It wasn’t exactly a date.’

‘Whatever,’ said Frances. ‘But wasn’t it wonderful, watching him cook? I remember the first time he made supper for David and me – it was a revelation. It was like knowing someone and thinking they’re fairly normal, then discovering they can juggle or do magic tricks. He was so at home. Just the way he chopped vegetables or handled a piece of meat. I couldn’t see how he did it all so quickly and casually. Except it wasn’t casual. When I saw him cook, I thought he loved food more than he loved people.’

‘I know what you mean.’

‘Preparing a meal, tasting it… I think he misses that, being management rather than spending all his time in the kitchen, hands on, getting his fingers sticky.’

‘I get your point,’ I said. I was trying to think of a way to change the subject.

‘David is one of the restaurant’s main backers,’ she continued. ‘I’m afraid it’s all very incestuous.’

‘Is that what David does for a living?’

‘Sometimes. It’s hard to explain – I don’t think I really understand it myself. David is a rather mysterious man.’ She gave a little frown, as if an unpleasant thought had occurred to her. I saw the way she plaited her hands together tightly, so her thick gold band cut into her wedding finger. ‘He buys things, changes them a bit and sells them again, usually for much more than he bought them. And he makes problems go away for people who’ve got into a financial mess.’

‘What’s that called?’

Frances laughed. ‘I don’t really know. He earns a horrible amount of money from it, though. When you met him he was on his best behaviour. I’m not sure I’d like to be in one of those companies while he’s doing the sort of things he does to them, cutting away the dead wood or the fat, whatever he calls it. Anyway, that’s what gives me the freedom to do things like this.’

‘You make it sound like a hobby,’ I said.

‘From David’s point of view it is,’ she said, a bit wistfully, I thought. ‘Not mine. But he keeps an eye on me, for what it’s worth. Matter of fact, I think he’s having lunch with Johnny today.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Frances. ‘Just to talk things over. I don’t think he’ll get to eat in the kitchen, though.’

It must have been a very long lunch because it was late in the afternoon when the two of them wandered into the office, looking very relaxed. I didn’t trust myself to meet Johnny’s eye. I wondered if he would come over and kiss me or put his arm round me, do something to suggest what had happened, but he didn’t acknowledge me at all, so far as I could tell with my head down and pretending to concentrate. Instead I heard him talking to Frances in a low voice about a party that was coming up. At the same time I detected another presence close by me. I smelled a wave of aftershave and alcohol.

‘How do you take your coffee?’ David asked.

I looked round. He was wearing a fawn-coloured suit made of a peculiar material that was probably rare, expensive and enormously desirable. ‘No milk, no sugar,’ I said.

‘That’s easy, then,’ he said, and handed me the mug he was holding.

I expected him to join the others but he pulled up a chair and sat next to me. I sipped the coffee while he leaned over my desk. He picked up a piece of paper. It was just a summary of invoices with details of what had been received and not, paid and not, but he scrutinized it with a frown. He replaced it with a grunt I couldn’t interpret.

‘Is something wrong?’ I asked.

‘Far from it,’ he said. ‘Looking at this, I can’t imagine what Frances and Milena were up to. But you’re in danger of turning this company into a going concern.’

‘I’m just tidying up.’

He gave a languid smile. ‘That’s about ninety-nine per cent of what it takes to run a business.’ He looked across at his wife who was huddled in conversation with Johnny. ‘You’re wasted here,’ he continued. ‘I could use someone who can do work like this.’

‘It isn’t what I do for a living,’ I said.

‘You mean you want to get back to teaching a class of young hoodlums? Let me tell you, they’re not worth it.’

I felt I ought to leap to the defence of those kids, even if they didn’t exist; even if the person who was defending them didn’t really exist. ‘I don’t agree,’ I said.

‘You like teaching logarithms and trigonometry year after year?’

‘Um – yes!’ I replied wildly, praying he wouldn’t ask me anything technical. I knew about addition, subtraction, simple multiplication and even simpler division, and that, more or less, was it.

He ran his fingers through his thick, greying hair as if it was an architectural feature he was quietly proud of.

‘Johnny was talking about you at lunch. No, don’t worry,’ he said quickly. Perhaps he noticed an expression of alarm on my face. ‘He’s very impressed with you. He says you’ve got a flair for the job and that Frances was lucky to find you.’

I didn’t reply. Like so many conversations I was having in that office, I didn’t want it to go any further, any deeper. I did worry and, more than that, I didn’t like the idea of being discussed over lunch by those two men, as if I was a specimen. And I didn’t like the way that Johnny had brought David back to the office, as if they were going to look me over together, or so that Johnny could show off his latest conquest.

‘You’re an enigma. That’s what Johnny says. We lose Milena suddenly and tragically, and you appear like a white knight. It’s Fate.’

I snatched at the opportunity to push the conversation in a different direction. ‘It’s strange for me,’ I said. ‘Milena feels so present here, and absent as well. What did you make of her?’

‘You knew her, didn’t you?’ His tone was curt.

‘Not well,’ I said. ‘Were you close to her?’

I expected David to smile and make a joke but his face took on a stony expression.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t say I was close to her.’

‘But she was a remarkable character, wasn’t she?’

He allowed himself a very small, very forced smile. ‘In some ways, yes.’

‘You don’t sound as if you liked her very much.’

“‘Liked” is rather a tepid word when talking about someone like Milena. People either found her whole act appealing and attractive, or… well, they didn’t.’ He looked at me more closely. ‘It’s funny to think of you as connected to Milena because you’re as opposite from her as it’s possible to be.’

And yet, I thought, she’d been involved with my husband. Perhaps that was what he had been looking for: someone as different from me as it was possible to find.

‘You see?’ he said. ‘You’ve got me changing the subject. You’ve got me talking about Milena, when what I want to talk about is you. Milena would have liked that. She wanted to be the centre of attention. She would have liked the idea of us talking about her even after she was dead and buried. Or dead and scattered, in her case. To get back to you, what Johnny said is that he thought very highly of you – as I’ve said – but he couldn’t make you out. Reserved, mysterious, those were the words he used about you.’

I tried to force a laugh. I felt I was being backed into a corner. ‘There’s nothing mysterious about me,’ I said. ‘I wish there was. I’m really just a glorified cleaner here. I wanted to help Frances, that’s all.’

‘Why?’ said David. ‘Why did you want to help her? From a general love of humanity? A religious calling? Do we have a Good Samaritan here?’

‘It’s nothing complicated,’ I said. ‘When I was little I used to like clearing up my room, putting things in piles and arranging them. When I saw the mess this office was in, I wanted to sort it out. When the job’s done I’ll return to my old life.’

David glanced at me more sharply. ‘We’ll see,’ he said. ‘I reckon you’ll find it harder to walk out on this than you think.’

He had used a silky, detached tone that made it difficult for me to decide whether he was paying me a compliment or threatening me. He moved away and I tried to continue working but he poured himself a cup of coffee and returned to my side. He looked at the receipts, letters and invoices with me, made comments and suggestions. He was helping but it felt as if he was assessing me at the same time for a test I didn’t know how to pass because I didn’t know what the questions meant.

After a few minutes I felt a hand on my shoulder and Johnny pulled up a chair. I muttered a greeting without meeting his eye. I needn’t have worried about looking awkward because the two men chatted casually as if I wasn’t there. They were talking about another restaurant they were planning to revamp. Then they wandered around the room, making phone calls, drinking coffee, chatting until it was five o’clock. As I stood up to go, David said, ‘Do you fancy coming for a drink with us?’

‘I can’t,’ I said, deliberately not making an excuse, something that could be argued with.

Johnny stepped forward. ‘I’m about to drive in your direction,’ he said. ‘I could drop you.’

I shrugged, and he led me outside. We sat in his car.

‘I thought you needed rescuing from their clutches,’ he said.

‘I can look after myself,’ I said.

‘That’s probably true.’ There was a pause. ‘I meant it about driving you, though. Where shall we go? My place or yours? I’d like to see where you live. I’d like to learn something about you.’

The idea of Johnny prowling round my house trying to learn about me, about the real Gwen who wasn’t Gwen, was unbearable.

‘Let’s go to your place,’ I said.

He watched me as I undressed, as if seeing me naked was a way of seeing me as I really was. But even with my clothes off, even when we were entangled in his bed, I tried to make myself believe I wasn’t really there.

Afterwards, I lay with my back to him and felt his fingers running through my hair, down my spine.

‘This doesn’t mean anything to you, does it?’ he said.

I turned to face him. Suddenly I felt hard and cruel. I had spent too long trapped in my own misery, behaving as if I was the only one who was real and everybody else just a supporting actor in my drama. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘But – well, I am in the wrong place. Wrong place, wrong time. Working for Frances was meant to be an interlude. I need to stop it and get back to my own life.’

Johnny raised his hand and ran a finger down my nose, my cheek, the side of my jaw. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said. ‘What’s this if it’s not your life?’

That wasn’t a question I could answer. ‘I feel I’m filling in for a dead woman and it’s not right.’

‘That’s crap.’

‘Milena was the one the company was built round, she’s the one everybody talks about. She needs to be replaced, and that’s not something I could do, even if I wanted to.’

Johnny laughed. ‘You mean you’re not a drama queen. You’re not chronically disorganized. You’re not totally self-centred. You’re not manipulative. You know she thought she looked like Julie Delpy, the movie actress?’

‘I think I’ve seen her in something.’

‘She didn’t at all, of course. It was about wanting to be French and Bohemian. You’re not unreliable. You’re not dishonest.’

‘Reliable. Organized. Unselfish. Lovely. It sounds like I should get a Girl Guide badge.’

‘I didn’t mean it like that.’

I leaned forward and kissed him, but only on the forehead. ‘I’ve got to go.’ I climbed out of the bed and began to pull on my clothes, with my back to him so I couldn’t see him watching me.

‘There was one thing, though,’ Johnny said. ‘She didn’t leave in the middle of the night.’

I looked round sharply. Knowledge coursed through me, bitter and toxic. ‘You didn’t?’ I said, though of course I knew he had – and how had I not understood before? Milena had got into everyone’s lives, and was still there now, as powerful dead as she had been alive. ‘Tell me you didn’t.’

‘Is that a problem?’

‘Milena?’

‘Milena.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘You mean, tell you about an affair with someone who’s not alive any more and that happened before you and I knew each other?’

I pulled my sweater over my head. ‘You should have told me,’ I said.

‘Why would it have made any difference? It was before we met,’ he repeated, pulling on a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt, then following me downstairs and out on to the street. We stood in silence until the taxi arrived and he handed me in. Being angry, even unfairly angry, made it easier to leave.

The next morning, as soon as I arrived, I opened Milena’s computer and clicked on the email. When the window appeared asking for a password, I typed ‘juliedelpy’. I was in.

Chapter Nineteen

‘Was it a dream? A mistake? Shall we do it again? J xx.’

I pressed the semi-circular arrow beside Johnny’s message to see what Milena had written in reply: ‘Tonight, 11.30 p.m. your place. Light the fire.’

The following day: ‘You left your stockings. Next time, can’t you stay?’

And Milena replied: ‘Maybe you’ve forgotten that I’m a married woman.’

Two days later: ‘I can’t leave the restaurant at 10, I’m afraid. Later any good? Thinking of you every minute of the day, J xxxx.’

And the reply, a terse ‘No,’ to which Johnny responded, ‘OK, OK, I choose you over the crême brûlée. 10 then.’

Three emails she didn’t answer. The first was anxious: ‘Why didn’t you come? Has he found out? Please tell me.’ The second beseeching: ‘Milena, at least tell me what’s going on. I’m frantic.’ The third angry: ‘Fuck you, then.’

There were dozens and I read them all. Their affair had lasted weeks. They usually met late at night, but sometimes they grabbed an hour or two in the day. They used Johnny’s flat, Milena’s house, when Hugo wasn’t there, a hotel a few times, and once, according to Johnny’s rhapsodic account, which I read with wincing shame, the back of Milena’s BMW. I noticed that whereas Johnny’s emails were often emotional – besotted, elated, grateful, angry or hurt – Milena’s were almost always the same: short, practical, and often in the form of orders or careless ultimatums. She rarely mentioned her husband, and when she did it was as an irritating obstacle; she gave Johnny dates, times, places, that was it. I felt sorry and embarrassed for him: Milena was very sure of her power over him, and in his messages to her, he was not the sardonic and assured man I knew but someone insecure, needy, painfully submissive. By the end his messages deteriorated into abusive accusations about other lovers, deceit and calculating cold-heartedness. To these, Milena did not bother to respond.

In her work, Milena had been untidy and disorganized, not writing down appointments, expenses or even formal agreements, operating on a private whim that, often, she had not even shared with Frances. But her personal emails were scarily well ordered, almost playfully businesslike in their arrangement of betrayal, jealousy and loss. The first thing I discovered, when I entered Milena’s virtual world, was that she had a special mailbox for her love affairs, labelled ‘Miscellaneous’. Johnny was in there, and so was a lover from the previous year, who had begun as a client. It struck me that she rarely called them by their name: it was never ‘Dear Johnny’ or ‘Dear Craig’.

Gradually I came to feel a certain grudging, appalled admiration for the woman who’d taken my husband: she might have been predatory and cold, but she wasn’t a hypocrite. She didn’t say ‘make love’ but ‘fuck’; she didn’t pretend to feelings she didn’t possess; she never used the word ‘love’. I was struck by the apparent absence of pleasure, the energetic joylessness of her affairs. And she’d had so many. How had she managed it? All that planning, all that deception, all the lies she must have told, different lies to different men and having to remember which version of herself she was meant to be with which man. It made me weary just to think of it.

I searched for Greg by name, but wasn’t discouraged when nothing turned up: if I’d learned anything over the past grim weeks, it was that their secret was buried deep. I wouldn’t stumble across it but would have to uncover it with patience and guile. I glanced at the mailboxes, one by one. Johnny, the client Craig, someone called Richard, with whom Johnny had overlapped and who had unceremoniously faded out. There was a mailbox labelled ‘Accounts’, which set my heart pounding so ferociously that I pressed my hand against my chest to calm it, feeling dizzy with the terror that I was finally about to enter the hidden world of my dead husband, but it turned out to be just what it said: increasingly exasperated messages from Milena and Hugo’s financial adviser about her accounts, which were clearly in a mess. There were also several people who didn’t sign off with their own names and whose addresses didn’t give any immediate clue as to their owners’ identity – perhaps, I thought, one might turn out to be Greg, masquerading under an assumed name. And then, of course, there were other people who hadn’t been given their own special compartment, but were scattered randomly through the in-box, or who had been moved to the catch-all ‘Personal’ mailbox, which also held messages from friends, acquaintances and family.

‘What are you doing?’

I started. I had been so engrossed that I hadn’t noticed Beth arrive. I felt as if I’d been caught with my hands in the till. Perhaps, in some way, I had. ‘Checking some stuff out,’ I said.

‘You want some coffee?’

‘Great.’

While Beth was gone I wondered if what I was doing was wrong. Well, of course it was. The question was how wrong, and whether it mattered. Frances was my employer and she probably thought of me as a friend. Here I was, under false pretences, snooping through her office, rifling through her dead friend’s personal life, behaving like a spy. When Beth returned, she gave me the coffee but she didn’t head off, as she normally did, to potter around and talk on the phone. Instead she pulled up a chair and sat close to me, cradling her mug in her hands. I quickly closed Milena’s email window.

‘What are you doing here?’ she said.

I made myself laugh. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I’m working here because Frances is an old friend of my mum’s. It doesn’t pay much but the job’s good for making contacts. And it’s Frances’s life. But I don’t understand what’s in it for you.’

I couldn’t tell whether Beth was teasing, curious or suspicious. Had she picked up on some mistake? I tried to change the subject. ‘What about Milena? What was she in it for?’

‘Why are you so curious about her? It’s like an obsession with you – Milena this, Milena that.’

‘It’s strange her not being here,’ I said. ‘It’s like going to a play that’s missing the star.’

‘It’s funny,’ said Beth. ‘I’d never really known anyone before who died. There was a girl at university who was killed in a car crash but she wasn’t really a friend. I worked with Milena for a year and I’d never met anyone like her and I still wake up in the morning and suddenly remember she’s dead and it comes as a shock each time.’

‘Yes, I know,’ I said, although I wasn’t thinking of Milena any more.

When we’d finished our coffee, and Beth had taken my mug away, I told myself I mustn’t look at Milena’s emails, that it was too risky while Beth was there, but I couldn’t help myself. I arranged the screen so that she couldn’t see it and opened a notebook, so that I appeared to be doing accounts, and returned to it with dread and overpowering curiosity.

First – or first in this computer’s memory, going back two years and nine months – there was Donald Blanchard, barrister and colleague of Hugo’s, who called Milena ‘Panther’ and suffered from bursts of anxiety about betraying his friend, not to mention his own wife, which hadn’t stopped him taking Milena to Venice for a weekend.

I was able to follow one of the affairs, with a man who signed himself J, as if it was a piece of music. It began, as several did, with memories of ‘last night’ and anticipation of the next time. It wasn’t like reading love letters, more like a series of diary entries, times and places. Then it gradually petered out, although there was a sudden flurry at the end, as the affair finished. The last message consisted of the single ominous sentence: ‘Well, I can just phone her up, then.’ Milena clearly didn’t like being left.

This overlapped a more drawn-out affair with Harvey, who was visiting from the States. He went home and Richard arrived on the scene. During her time with Richard, Milena had a couple of flings: one was with a man much younger than herself, whom she referred to as her ‘toy boy’ and sent packing when he became too insistent. After Richard there had been Johnny. And after Johnny, in the crucial month before Greg and Milena had died together, there was only one other significant player: he never used a name, simply put a couple of crosses at the end of a message. I wrote his address in my notebook.

I stared at the screen until my eyes hurt. Was the anonymous lover Greg? He signed off with kisses and his hotmail address was ‘gonefishing’ – there were dozens of messages from him, spaced out over three months. They were love letters: they commented on her hair, her eyes, her hands, the way she looked when she smiled at him, the way he felt when he saw her before she lifted her head and saw him too. For a moment I had to stop reading. There was a lump in my throat and my vision blurred. If this was Greg, he had never written to me in that way. And if this was Greg, he was writing to a Milena no one else had known: someone more tender and lovable than the bright, glittering, heartless woman everyone else seemed to remember. And that made horrible sense to me: I couldn’t imagine Greg having a cold-hearted affair, but I could imagine him falling in love with a woman, and by his love transforming her into someone different, better. I used to think he had done that to me – discovered a version of myself that only existed when I was with him and that had disappeared when he had died.

Gradually the pain in my chest eased and I could look at the screen again. I put away the messages from the anonymous lovers for the moment and browsed through the in-box to see if anything relevant cropped up. There were various messages from ‘S’, cranky and intemperate. I looked at a couple of messages from her to him and recognized the flirtatious tone she reserved for certain men, very different from the brisker style she adopted with Frances, Beth or female clients. It seemed a very particular sort of betrayal to be reading Beth’s mail while she was sitting in the same room but, then, I was becoming something of a connoisseur of betrayal.

I was about to open a message from Milena’s husband when I heard the front door open and Frances hurried down the stairs, looking flushed. ‘Hi!’ she said, tossing her coat on to the sofa and coming over to kiss my cheek, which felt hot with shame and anxiety. ‘Sorry I was away so long.’

‘That’s OK.’

‘What have you been up to?’

‘Just clearing things up a bit,’ I mumbled. Couldn’t she tell that everything was exactly as it had been when she had left, not a single piece of paper moved or dealt with?

‘Good,’ she said. ‘You mustn’t work too hard, though.’

‘No, no, I didn’t.’

She looked at Beth. ‘Could you make us some tea, darling?’

Beth pulled a face, got up and left the room with obvious reluctance.

Frances came over and stood close by me. ‘It’s been good having you here,’ she said, in a subdued tone. ‘I haven’t said this to you – well, I haven’t said it to anyone – but when Milena died I thought I might give up the business.’

‘Really?’

‘To be honest, even before that things hadn’t been going well. Milena had…’ Frances paused. ‘Let’s just say that a lot of what brought me into the business seemed to have gone away.’

‘So things were bad before she died?’

There was another long pause, in which Frances’s face took on a troubled expression I hadn’t seen before. ‘It’s all in the past now,’ she said finally, ‘and it’s not what I wanted to talk about. Maybe another time. We could go out for lunch – or dinner, even.’

‘I’d like that,’ I said.

‘You’re easy to talk to and, to be honest, I need advice. There are things I need to say out loud.’

I didn’t know how to respond; I felt my deceit must be written across my face. I made an indeterminate sound and stared at my hands, my ringless finger.

‘What I was going to say,’ Frances continued, ‘is that I know David was talking to you but I wanted to ask you formally if you’d think of staying on.’

‘Here?’ I asked stupidly.

‘That was the general idea.’

‘I’ve given you the wrong impression,’ I said. ‘I’m just a teacher taking a bit of time out.’

‘I like having you around. Most people irritate me. You don’t.’

‘Thank you.’ I couldn’t meet her eyes. ‘But I don’t think it’s possible.’

‘Don’t say no at once. Think it over at least. Are you in tomorrow?’

‘There are things I need to do.’

‘I’d be grateful if you could manage an hour or so in the morning. I’ve got to go out.’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘Now I ought to leave. Things to do.’

‘But before you go, I think I should pay you for the last few days.’

‘Later.’

‘Gwen! Anyone would think you were doing this for nothing.’

‘Don’t worry, I’m not a saint.’

‘Johnny seems to think you’re pretty perfect.’ My face burned. l heard myself mutter something unintelligible. ‘Don’t worry. He hasn’t said anything to me. He’s pretty discreet. I’ve just seen the way he looks at you.’

‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ I managed to say, and dashed out.

I told myself I mustn’t go back, but it had become an addiction. I had to go back, just to look through the rest of Milena’s emails. I arrived home in a restless and agitated state. My answering-machine was flashing but I didn’t bother to listen to the messages. I made myself a cup of tea and drank it while I paced round the house. I opened the fridge and had one of the liquid yoghurts Mary had brought. She said it would be good for my digestion; it tasted of coconut and vanilla and coated my tongue. I went into my neglected little garden. Darkness was drawing in, giving everything a mysterious air. I noticed the drifts of sodden leaves on the lawn, the nettles growing up against the back wall. There were a few yellow roses left on the bush by the back door. The bedraggled little blackbird was singing its heart out in the gloom. I reminded myself that I still had time to plant bulbs for spring. The previous autumn we’d planned snow-drops, winter aconites, daffodils and red tulips. Greg had loved tulips – he said they were the only flowers that were as beautiful dying as they were unfurling. I realized that I no longer had any difficulty in thinking of him in the past tense. When had that happened? On what day had he slipped between the cracks of memory to lie with other departed people in the deeper places of my mind?

Back in the house, I laid my two charts on the kitchen table and looked at them, my brain tingling uselessly. I took my notebook out of my bag and stared at the two addresses. What should I do now? The phone rang and I didn’t answer it. I waited to hear the message but there wasn’t one. Then it rang again, but still I didn’t answer. It rang yet again. It was like a game of chicken. Finally I gave up and answered.

‘I knew you were there.’ It was Fergus.

‘Sorry, I was tired.’

‘I wanted to ask you for supper. Jemma’s put a chicken in the oven, I’ve lit a fire.’

‘As I said, I’m a bit tired.’

‘If you don’t come, we’ll put the dinner in the car and drive over to you. And if you don’t let us in we’ll eat on your doorstep and embarrass you in front of your neighbours.’

‘All right, all right, I’ll come.’

‘I’ll come, thank you.’

I laughed. ‘Sorry for being so rude. Yes, thank you for asking me.’

Jemma was very, very pregnant. Every so often she winced as the baby kicked her. At her invitation, I put my hand on her belly and felt it writhing and jabbing. She told me it kept getting hiccups.

‘There are so many things people won’t say to me,’ I said, after two glasses of wine.

‘What do you mean?’ Fergus leaned forward to top up my glass but I put my hand over it.

‘Well, for example, you two don’t talk to me about the baby unless I press you. You think it might upset me – because of Greg, because we never managed it and now it’s too late. And of course it upsets me, but it’s not as if I forget about it until you remind me. It’s much better to say things, otherwise I feel shut out from life. Mary used to go on about Robin at every hour of the day – his snuffles, his nappies, the way his fist closed round her finger – and now she barely mentions him. Gwen used to tell me about her love life. Joe would regularly complain to me about having a cold or some bloody rich client. Not any more.’

‘In that case,’ said Fergus, glancing sideways at Jemma for her approval, ‘we wanted to ask you something.’

‘Yes?’

‘Will you be its godmother?’

‘Godmother?’

‘Yes.’

‘But you don’t believe in God.’

‘Well, that’s not really the point.’

‘Neither do I.’

‘Is that a no?’

‘Of course I’ll be its godmother! I’d love to.’ I was crying, tears sliding down my cheek and into my mouth. I wiped the back of my hand across my face and held out my glass for more wine. ‘Here’s to whoever-it-is.’

‘Whoever-it-is,’ they echoed.

Fergus got up and hugged me. ‘I’m so sorry about everything,’ he whispered.

I shrugged.

Chapter Twenty

When I got home, I had decided what to do. It would have been easy to send emails from Milena’s account, simply replying to the messages she had received from old lovers, but that felt too risky. Even if I stayed anonymous, it would have to be sent by someone who knew Milena’s password. It might even establish a connection with Milena’s computer or her office. The safest idea seemed to be to set up a hotmail account for myself. I had no idea how easy it was to trace emails, but I probably wasn’t dealing with computer experts here. Creating the new email address, I simply jabbed randomly at the keyboard and ended up with j4F93nr4wQ5@hotmail.co.uk. I entered my first name as J and my second name as Smith. As a password I wrote out a sequence of numbers and upper- and lower-case letters. When I was done, I sent myself an email, just to check. There was just ‘J Smith’, the subject line, the date and time and the address. That seemed safe enough.

I entered the first of the email addresses I had retrieved from Milena’s computer, wrote ‘re’ beside ‘subject’, and then, after a few moments’ thought, typed: ‘Dearest Robin, I am LONGING to see you and…’ I tried to think of a plausible name. ‘Petra’. No – wasn’t that a dog’s name? And a tourist destination. ‘Katya’. Sounded a bit exotic. I realized I was thinking of names that sounded too like ‘Milena’. I looked at the books on the shelf. ‘Richmal’. Hopeless. ‘Elizabeth’. Was anyone called that any more? ‘Eliza’. ‘Lizzie’. ‘Beth’. ‘Bessie’. They all sounded ridiculous. Anyway, what did it matter. ‘Lizzie’ would do. And then I remembered. No, it wouldn’t do. The name needed to start with a J. Jackie then. ‘Jackie again after all this time. Ring as soon as you arrive, love Jackie xxxxx PS I hope this is your email address and if it isn’t will whoever is reading it let me know!!!!!’

I read it over and then again. I pressed send and it was gone. I wrote the same message to the second address as well and sent it. I thought of when I was a child and sometimes I had been afraid to post a letter because when I pushed it through the slot and heard it fall, I would realize it was still there, a few inches away, but lost to me, beyond change or recall.

The next morning, when I arrived at the office, Frances was talking on the phone. She was preparing a party for a firm of City lawyers that was being held in an old warehouse by the river. As I switched on Milena’s computer, she slammed down the phone and strode over to me. ‘They want a Shakespearean theme,’ she said. ‘I don’t even know what that means.’

‘Can’t you just hire some young actors?’ I said. ‘They can walk round with the canapés and say lines from Shakespeare. About cakes and ale and, well, there must be some other references to food.’

‘And they want Elizabethan food. I mean, honestly! I had this ridiculous woman on the line just now and I said, “What do you mean by Elizabethan food? Carp? Pike? Capon?” She said, “Oh, no. They just want normal food with an Elizabethan twist.”’

There were shelves of books and magazines in the office for just such a crisis and Frances started to rummage through them, speaking half to herself and half to me. I went to my new account. My new email address and password were impossible to remember. I had to copy them painstakingly from the piece of paper on which I’d written them.

‘What exactly are sweetbreads?’ said Frances. ‘Some kind of gland, aren’t they?’

‘I’m not sure if they’re right for finger food,’ I said. I had to make an effort to keep my voice level because I had noticed there were two messages for me. The first was welcoming me as a new account holder. The second was from ‘gonefishing’.

Frances walked across the room towards me, reading aloud as she did so.

‘Jugged hare,’ she said. ‘Lobster. This is hopeless. We might as well be cooking larks’ tongues.’

‘You just want little things that have an old-fashioned look to them,’ I said. ‘Quail’s eggs. Bits of bacon. Dumplings. Scallops.’

I clicked on the message.

‘Who are you?’ it read.

I clicked ‘reply’ and quickly typed. ‘I’m Jackie, as you can see. Have I got the wrong address? Who are you?’

I highlighted and underlined the last word: ‘Who are you?’ I pressed send.

‘That sounds right,’ said Frances. ‘We can just put Ye Olde English garnishes on the plates. Bits of parchment. Branches of rosemary. Little ruffs. We can hang some tapestries and garlands on the wall. Pickled walnuts,’ she added, warming to the subject. ‘Medlars. Quinces. The problem is, people won’t know what they are.’

‘It’ll give the staff something to talk about,’ I said. ‘In fake Elizabethan language, of course. “Odds bodkins”. You know.’

There was a ping from Milena’s computer. A message from ‘gonefishing’.

‘Who are you?’ it said, same as before. I pressed reply again.

‘Don’t understand,’ I typed. ‘Did you get my last message? Have I got the wrong address? Could you give me your name?’ I pressed send.

I waited one minute, two, but there was no response.

Meanwhile Frances was flicking through another book. ‘Did they have oysters in Elizabethan times?’ she asked.

‘I think so.’

‘I’m a bit wary of shellfish. You don’t want to poison a roomful of lawyers.’

My attention drifted away and I suddenly heard Frances’s voice raised, as if she was trying to rouse me from sleep.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t hear what you were saying. I was trying to sort something out in my head.’

She looked at me with concern. ‘Are you all right? You’re rather pale.’

‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘Maybe a bit tired.’

Frances fussed over me as if she was my granny. She felt my brow with her thin, cool hand. She made me coffee and even asked if I’d like a touch of brandy in it. ‘Now, that might be the thing for the end of the party,’ she said. ‘Did they have coffee in Elizabethan times? They must have had brandy.’

Reluctantly I left my desk and we thumbed through the cookbooks for ideas. We discussed goujons of sole, devilled whitebait, creamed mushrooms and smoked eel, baby tomatoes stuffed with crab, and new potatoes stuffed with caviar. Frances was doubtful about the last. ‘I’ll need to run this past the wretched Daisy at G and C’s,’ she said. ‘This might be a bit steep even for them. I saw some caviar at Fortnum’s the other day. It was about a million pounds a thimbleful.’

As she was talking, I heard a ping from Milena’s computer and suddenly it was as if I was in a dream and Frances’s words were meaningless background noise. I had to force myself to talk normally as she put the cookbooks down and wandered across to the shelves for an exhibition catalogue.

‘Can you give me a moment?’ I said, and walked across to Milena’s computer. I clicked on the new message. ‘Nobody has this address,’ it said. ‘How did you get it?’

I collected my thoughts and made myself take on the character of Jackie, a non-existent person conjured up by another non-existent person. ‘Maybe I got it wrong,’ I wrote. ‘I just wanted your name to see if I’ve mixed it up with someone else. But if it’s a problem, don’t worry about it.’

I sent it and returned to Frances, who had found an old catalogue for an exhibition of Elizabethan miniatures. She smiled and pointed at an exquisitely delicate oval image of a woman wearing a tall hat with a white ostrich feather, a lace ruff, sleeves bunched and embroidered with gold thread and a rigid, richly decorated bodice. ‘She looks like you,’ she said. ‘I’d like to see you in that.’

‘I haven’t the waistline for it,’ I said.

Frances looked at me appraisingly, as if I was a pig she was considering buying. ‘Oh, yes, you have,’ she said. ‘How do you do it? Exercise and good living?’

Not eating, not sleeping, constant anxiety, I thought, but just smiled with what I hoped was rueful modesty. We leafed through the gorgeous catalogue, pausing over men in doublets and ruffs, stockings and breeches; women in cloaks and petticoats, corsets and farthingales.

‘If we can dress some of our young actors in these,’ said Frances, ‘and get them to learn a few lines, it should be magnificent. If we want to be really authentic, we should probably have the women played by men as well.’

‘I don’t think the lawyers would like that,’ I said. ‘When they asked for Elizabethan they were probably thinking of wenches dispensing flagons of ale and behaving bawdily. It might be a gruelling evening for some of them.’

Frances grunted. ‘The drama-school girls we employ are pretty unshockable,’ she said. ‘You know, if they were laid end to end in the garden, et cetera et cetera.’

I heard another ping from the computer and got distracted again. ‘Et cetera what?’ I said.

‘I wouldn’t be the least surprised.’

‘What?’

‘It’s an old joke. I’ve ruined it now. If the girls were laid end to end in the garden. You know. I wouldn’t be in the least surprised.’

‘Oh, yes,’ I said. ‘I think I’ve heard it.’

‘Dorothy Parker, I think.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Excuse me a moment. Someone’s sent me a message.’ I couldn’t pretend to continue a conversation. I walked over to the computer and clicked on the new message.

‘Sorry for being paranoid,’ the message read. ‘It’s a security issue. Just give me your phone number and I’ll give you a ring and tell you my name.’

As I read the message, I felt as if I had immediately, and without warning, become immensely more stupid. I was like a person in a foreign country who just about understood what basic words meant but couldn’t make out what lay behind them, what was implied, what were the customs everybody took for granted. I found it impossibly difficult to assess what the message meant, its implications. Was there any possible way I could give some phone number or other to this person? Was it conceivable that they would ring and tell me who they were and I would know who this lover of Milena’s was?

Suddenly everything was made up of puzzles I wasn’t equipped to solve.

Was it possible that whoever it was believed my message had been a mistake? Could that be a security issue? Was it likely they would go to the trouble of phoning to clear the matter up? My thoughts were slow, trapped in sludge, but in the end, with Frances hemming and hawing and waiting for me on the other side of the room, I decided, no, it was not possible. I had gone too far. I had laid myself open.

My password seemed safe. Certainly it was safe from me, as there was no chance I would ever remember it. But just to be absolutely safe I deleted all of the messages, both those I had received and those I had saved, and then deleted the deletions. If I could have, I would have deleted those as well, but as far as I could tell, they were as pulverized as anything can be in cyberspace.

I rejoined Frances and we made more Elizabethan plans, then went out to lunch where we ate a meal that seemed as far from Elizabethan cuisine as it could have been, all tiny slices of tuna carpaccio and miniature heaps of spicy noodles. But, then, I know nothing about Elizabethan cuisine apart from what I’ve seen in historical dramas on TV. For all I know, Elizabethans might have had delicate side orders of beansprouts with their haunches of venison. We also had a small jug of warm sake which Frances drank quickly and greedily, barely looking at her food before ordering a second. I remembered the vodka bottles in her desk drawer. She talked about whether we could hire a jester from the Comedy Store and wondered whether health and safety regulations would allow flaming torches on the walls, whether we could hire Elizabethan musicians – and what was Elizabethan music like? What about morris dancers? Were they Elizabethan?

‘It’s all about money,’ Frances said thoughtfully, as we lingered over the coffee. ‘If you’re in London and you’ve got money, you can have anything.’ And then she pushed her food, barely touched, away from her and said, ‘Except happiness, of course. That’s a whole different story.’

I didn’t know what to say. In normal circumstances I would have reached across the table and touched her arm, asked what she meant, tried to draw her out. But these weren’t normal circumstances. If she turned to me for support, she would be turning to someone who didn’t exist and, what was more, someone who would leave her before long. So I wrinkled my brow and murmured something meaningless.

‘Would you say you were happy, Gwen?’ she asked, raising her pale, delicate face to me.

‘Oh, well.’ I stabbed my fork into the final sliver of tuna. ‘That’s hard to say. I mean, what’s happiness?’

‘I used to be,’ she continued. ‘It seemed easy once. Or maybe I wasn’t really happy. Maybe I was just having fun. That’s different, isn’t it? I think I used to be very selfish. I didn’t understand that actions had consequences. When Milena and I first met, before we were married, we were a bit like Beth, I suppose – out every night, lots of men, lots of parties, lots of drink. But then it all changed. You reap what you sow, that’s what they say. But I wish I’d understood then what I was sowing. Shall we have a dessert wine?’

‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘If I drink during the day I fall asleep. But go ahead if you feel like one.’

‘No, you’re probably right, and we should get back to work, I suppose. Sorry to ramble on. Sometimes I feel so…’ But she stopped, shook her head as if to clear it, put her spectacles back on, gave me a wry smile. ‘Right. Let’s go and talk doublets and hose.’

When we returned to the office, I felt Milena’s computer drawing me as if I was attached to it with invisible cords. But I didn’t work on the computer that afternoon. I sketched our thoughts for the party into a coherent proposal. It was so trivial and so interesting that I felt regret that this would surely be my farewell to working with Frances. I finished the proposal and had almost cleared my desk when David arrived to collect her. He was in a bad mood and scarcely glanced in my direction. Frances made an apologetic grimace. I muttered an excuse and left.

When I got home, I ran up to the computer without even taking off my jacket. I went through the tiresome business of typing in my new email address and password, copying each character one by one. There was a new message and I clicked on it.

The previous messages had been written above the one before but now the old ones had been deleted. The subject line said, ‘Who are you?’ and the message repeated, ‘Who are you?’

Chapter Twenty-one

Against my better judgement, I had promised to be at the latest Party Animals happening because Beth was away for the long weekend she’d been planning. A very long weekend that was actually one day short of a week. ‘Just to give you a better feel for what we do,’ Frances had said, the afternoon before. ‘You don’t need to do anything, really. Just be in the background and keep an eye on things.’ She had examined me dubiously. ‘It’s that women-in-commerce thing you costed,’ she said. ‘You know, dozens of high-powered women networking and complaining about men. So if you could…’ She faltered.

‘Wear a suit?’

‘Yes. Something like that. Thanks, Gwen.’

I didn’t own a suit, or even anything that could be put together to look like a version of one. I hauled myself out of bed and showered under tepid water because the boiler operated in a mysterious and sporadic way and I didn’t have the money to get it adjusted – I didn’t have the money, as it happened, even for food, but I couldn’t think about my bank balance now. It would have to wait, just as everything else would have to wait: friends, a job, real life.

Sure enough, there was nothing in the cupboard that Frances might possibly approve of. The only suit there was Greg’s green-grey one that he had worn when we married and that, even in my rage-filled binge, I hadn’t been able to bring myself to burn. I took it out and examined it. It was lovely, simple and lightweight. I’d helped him choose it and it was the most expensive item of clothing either of us had ever bought. I held it against myself: it was a bit long but I could roll up the legs and put a belt round the waist. When I tried it on, I was startled by how different I looked, how jauntily androgynous. I put on a white shirt and tied an old bootlace round my neck in imitation of a tie. A trilby would have completed the effect, but I didn’t own one, so I put on a corduroy newspaper-boy’s cap that we’d found in Brick Lane one spring morning, tucking my hair underneath it, and putting studs in my ears. Now I didn’t look like Ellie or Gwen, but someone entirely new.

I had time before I needed to leave for the City, so I made myself instant coffee and had the last fragments of the now-soft cornflakes that Greg used to eat sometimes. The light was flashing on my answering-machine but I decided not to listen to the messages. I already knew that half of them would be from Gwen and Mary and they would say, ‘Where are you?’ and ‘Ring me back as soon as you can,’ and ‘What’s going on?’ Then, like a crack addict, I went back to the computer and looked at the email I’d received last night. I didn’t need to, of course. There were still only those three words: ‘Who are you?’ I had no idea what to do next, and although common sense insisted that I leave well alone – leave Frances and Party Animals, leave my snooping and prying, leave my hapless pretence at being someone else, return to the life I’d left behind and try to build a sustainable future – I knew very well that I wasn’t going to. Not yet, anyway. But I couldn’t think of a way to find out the identity of ‘gonefishing’. Obviously, I couldn’t give him my number, home or mobile. I didn’t want to speak to him, to have him hear my voice. But I had to give him some number to ring me on.

Perhaps I could ask Gwen to talk to him, while pretending not to be Gwen, of course, because I was Gwen. But I dismissed the idea, because I didn’t want to be told – as I most definitely would be – that what I was doing was misguided and wrong, and I should stop at once. I already knew that.

I stared at the screen until the words blurred. I stared at my new hotmail address: j4F93nr4wQ5@hotmail.co.uk. And it came to me: what I should do was simply repeat what I’d already done with my email and get myself a new mobile, whose number I wouldn’t give to anyone except ‘gonefishing’. When he rang, I wouldn’t answer, but I would have his number on my phone. That was a step forward, at least.

I had time to buy the pay-as-you-go phone and still be early at the women-in-commerce lunch, which took place in a vaulted basement in the heart of the City, a dimly lit, handsome space of ancient brick, cold stone and muted echoes. A fire blazed in the hearth at one end of the room, and vases holding velvety red roses stood at intervals on the long table. Slender wine glasses – which nobody used because they drank sparkling water – and silver cutlery glinted. It all felt very old-fashioned and masculine, which, as Frances had explained to me, was the point: this was to be like a stereotypical gentlemen’s club taken over by the ladies. It was typical of Frances to make something so establishment simultaneously ironic.

Sure enough, the women, when they arrived, had on the club uniform. They all wore beautiful skirts and jackets and dresses, in black and grey and dark brown, with white shirts, elegant shoes, sheer tights, discreet flashes of gold at their ears and on their fingers. They flowed down the stairs, handing cashmere coats, leather gloves, slender briefcases and furled umbrellas to the staff, and stood in their massed, discreetly ostentatious wealth. I felt shabby, angry, out of place – like a court jester. I wanted to go home, put on my oldest jeans and plane curls off pale, seasoned wood.

But when Frances saw me she raised her eyebrows. ‘You look very fetching,’ she said, smiling. ‘You certainly have your own style, Gwen.’ I didn’t know if that was a compliment or a veiled insult.

It hardly felt like work: I drifted from kitchen to cloakroom and back to the dining room, keeping an eye on things, making sure the lunch ran smoothly and courses were delivered at the right time. Yet by the end I felt weary and stale, in need of fresh air, natural light. When I stepped out on to the street, I gasped and shrank back into the doorway. Joe was walking along the pavement towards me, his coat billowing round his solid figure. He was carrying his bag and seemed deep in thought; there was an angry frown on his face. I felt as though someone had struck me. My mouth was dry and my heart pressed against my ribs. He mustn’t see me, not when I was dressed in Greg’s wedding suit and being Gwen, not when, in a few moments, Frances would come up the stairs behind me and witness him greeting me as Ellie. I bent double, pretending to tie up the laces of my shoes, which didn’t possess laces, and when I glanced up, he had passed by on the other side of the road, although I could still see his familiar figure striding away, towards some banking client perhaps. I stood upright and tried to collect myself, although I felt slightly sick with shock. How easy it would be for my two worlds to collide and shatter.

When I got home, a piece of paper was lying on the doormat. ‘Where are you, what are you doing and why aren’t you answering my calls? RING ME NOW! Gwenxxxx.’

I pushed the message out of my way, took the new phone out of its box and plugged it in to charge. Then I opened my hotmail account and copied out the new email address. ‘This is my phone number,’ I wrote, and keyed it in. I took a deep breath and pressed send. There, it was gone. Now all I had to do was wait.

I couldn’t put off listening to my phone messages any longer: Gwen, Joe, Gwen, Gwen, my bank manager, Joe, Mary, my mother twice, Mary again, Gwen and Gwen and Gwen, my sister, Fergus twice, a woman calling about a chest of drawers that needed stripping, my bank manager again, a wrong number, Gwen, who sounded frantic with anxiety now. I felt a pinch of guilt. I would call her soon. Tomorrow. After I’d sorted this latest thing out. I couldn’t talk to anybody until then. It wasn’t possible.

But even as I was thinking this there was an insistent knocking at the door. I got up to answer it, then sat down again. No: it would be Gwen or Mary or Joe or Fergus and I wasn’t in the mood. If I didn’t open the door, they’d go away. The knocking continued. Did they know somehow I was in there? Then it stopped.

I breathed out with relief and stood up. What now? I opened the fridge door and stared dispiritedly into the white space. A lonely knob of hard cheese, a past-its-sell-by-date packet of butter and a shrink-wrapped stub of chorizo sat on the otherwise empty shelves. As I stood there, I had a creepy feeling that I wasn’t alone. I heard a rustle behind me, coming from the garden and, very slowly, I turned. Someone was staring in at me through the window. Gwen. Her sweet-natured face was transformed by a huge scowl. Another face appeared beside her and the two glared in at me. Then Mary raised her fist and rapped sharply on the glass. ‘Let us in!’ she yelled.

I opened the back door and stood aside so that they could enter.

‘What are you playing at?’ hissed Gwen, dumping a large shopping bag on the table.

‘What are you wearing?’ said Mary.

‘Didn’t you get my messages? My note? Do you know how worried we’ve all been?’

‘I – I was busy,’ I mumbled.

‘Busy? Well, I was busy too, as it happens. You can’t just hide away, you know. Fuck. I pictured you lying in a ditch – or in a bath with your wrists cut or something. If you don’t want to see us, fine, but at least tell us you’re all right. We were going to ring the police if you hadn’t been here this evening.’

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t think.’

‘Well, you should have done! That’s no excuse. You should have a bit of consideration.’

Gwen started pulling items out of the bag. Ground coffee, milk, shortbread biscuits, wholemeal bread, salad, carrots, a bottle of wine, eggs. She thumped them down on the table angrily.

‘Was that suit Greg’s?’ asked Mary.

‘Yes,’ I said shortly.

‘You look great.’ There was a hint of accusation in her voice. It would have been better if I’d been haggard and red-eyed with grief. ‘Doesn’t she look great, Gwen?’

‘Hmm. Where have you been?’

‘Trying to sort things out.’

Gwen snorted. ‘That’s a feeble answer.’

‘It’s true,’ I insisted, and after all, it was in its own way.

‘Have you been getting back to your work?’

‘Not exactly. A bit.’

‘A bit. Have you dealt with your financial stuff, been to the bank and your solicitor, visited his parents, like you said you would?’

‘I will soon.’

‘So what have you been sorting out?’

‘I – There’s a lot of bits and pieces.’ It sounded so lame that I blushed to the roots of my hair.

‘What are you up to, Ellie?’ Gwen asked.

‘I’m not up to anything.’ But I couldn’t meet her gaze.

‘This is us, remember,’ said Mary. She had sat down at the table and was now chewing absent-mindedly at one of the carrots Gwen had brought.

The phone rang suddenly and I stiffened. But it was only my landline and we waited in silence as the answering-machine picked up and Joe’s voice came on: ‘Ellie. Ellie, honey? It’s me. Come on.’ There was a pause, and then he said again, ‘Ellie?’ before hanging up.

‘See? Another anxious friend.’

For a moment I considered telling them everything I had done. But to do that wouldn’t I also have to give up my subterfuge, my lies, deceits and unhealthy obsessions? ‘I’m really, really sorry,’ I said. ‘Honestly I am. I know I’m behaving oddly, wrongly. I can’t explain it properly. I’ve been all over the place.’ I twisted my hands together, my naked, ringless fingers. ‘I keep thinking things will get better.’

‘We’re here to help you,’ said Gwen. ‘You know that. Don’t shut us out.’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Now we’re here, shall I make us tea?’ asked Mary. ‘Tea and biscuits and then we can go out. Eric’s looking after Robin this evening so I’m free. What d’you say? Film and meal, just the three of us, like it used to be?’

What I wanted to say was that I felt tired and agitated and my heart was bouncing in my chest like a rubber ball and all I wanted to do was wait by the phone, but their two kind, familiar faces showed such concern that I said, ‘That would be very nice.’

I got home just after midnight and ran to check the new phone. There were no messages but there was one missed call. I picked up the mobile. Resting in my hand, it felt like a bomb that might go off at any time. In bed, the phone on the table beside me, I could feel myself fizzing with excitement and dread, and when I finally slept, it was fitfully, to taunting dreams.

Frances kissed me on both cheeks. ‘I’m so glad you’re here. I’ve got to dash out in an hour or so and I won’t be back until mid-afternoon. It would be great if you could go through the new brochure for me. I’ve got to get it to the printers this afternoon and it’s littered with errors.’

‘It’s not that I mind, but what about Beth?’

‘Oh, you can show it to her, but she’s no use. She studied events management at university, which means she can barely read or write.’

‘Fine. I’ll do my best.’

‘Let’s have coffee first, though.’

‘Shall I get it?’

‘No, no. Let me.’

There was a hectic air about her: she couldn’t seem to sit still; she kept taking her glasses off and putting them on again, running her hand through her hair.

‘Are you all right?’ I asked.

‘Me? Fine. Why do you ask?’

‘You seem a bit restless.’

‘Maybe I am. Strange times.’

‘I’m sure.’

‘I’m really glad you’re around, though, Gwen. I don’t have many women friends I can talk to.’

That she counted me a friend filled me with fresh shame. I buried my face in my coffee cup to hide my expression.

‘It’s funny, isn’t it?’ she continued. ‘Sometimes I think women are much more rivalrous and catty with each other than they ever are with men. Don’t you agree?’

She was probably remembering Milena, but I thought of Gwen and Mary as they had been last night, their grumpy, unflagging loyalty and love, and shook my head. ‘Not always,’ I said.

‘Do you have close friends?’

‘A few.’

‘Good.’ She sounded wistful. ‘I’m glad. We all need friends. Listen, there’s something I need to talk about. Otherwise this feeling I have, of guilt and disgust with myself, will rot away inside me and poison me. I need to confess.’

What could I say? I gave a small nod for her to continue.

‘In your relationships,’ she asked, ‘have you always been faithful?’

‘Yes,’ I said, because it was the truth.

‘That must be a nice feeling.’ Her voice was so soft I could hardly catch her words. She stared into my eyes for a few seconds, then looked away. While she spoke, she gazed at a spot a few inches to one side of me.

‘When I married,’ she said, ‘I made promises, but I didn’t really think about what they meant, not properly. And David and I – Well, you’ve seen us together. It’s not great. It hasn’t been for some time. He was busy, I was busy, we had separate lives. Bit by bit we drifted apart without realizing it. And bit by bit I became lonely – but I didn’t realize that either. It happened too gradually. And one day I knew I was unhappy. My life felt all wrong but I was stuck in it. And then…’ She stopped and turned her gaze on me briefly. ‘It’s such a fucking cliché, isn’t it? I met a man. A very special man. He made me feel good about myself. It was as if he recognized me, saw someone precious behind the façade I’d built up.’

She rubbed her eyes wearily. ‘It was such a mess, though. Not just because I was married – for a bit that hardly bothered me. He’d had a thing with Milena first.’

I managed to make a small sound. My heart felt large and painful.

‘Just a fling, really, but you know what Milena was like. She didn’t take it well that he preferred me. That was putting it mildly. She hated me, really hated me. I felt her hatred would literally scorch me when I walked into the room.’ Frances shuddered. ‘And then she died.’

‘So this man,’ I said, ‘she knew you were with him?’

‘Oh, yes. Milena always knew everything.’

‘Was he married as well?’ I barely recognized my own voice.

‘What do you think, Gwen? Yes, he was married.’

‘Who was he?’

Her expression hardened. ‘That’s not what it’s about,’ she said, in a tone almost of distaste. ‘What does that matter?’

‘I didn’t mean…’

‘It’s over, that’s all that matters.’ She gave a laugh that wasn’t really a laugh at all, closer to a sob. ‘Something happened. I still can’t make sense of it, Gwen. It’s tormenting me. That was why I had to tell someone – otherwise I’ll go mad.’

She leaned forward, and at that moment there was a ring at the front door. She straightened. ‘That’ll be my cab.’ She gave me a rueful smile. ‘To be continued,’ she said, and with that she was gone, tossing her gorgeous coat over her shoulders, picking up her bag, throwing me a pleading smile, running up the stairs. I heard the front door slam.

After she had gone I stayed where I was. I was trying to breathe. I felt as though I had knives in my chest and each small inhalation hurt. It was several minutes before I felt able to get up, but even then I stood in the middle of the room, not sure what to do next. Thoughts hissed in my brain. Everything was murky and confused.

But I had come here to work and work I did: I went through the brochure very carefully and marked it up for the printers. When Beth arrived, I gave it to her to check. I had worried that she might be resentful, but Beth never resented anything that made her workload even lighter than it was already. While she leafed through it and talked on the phone and made tea, I filed the few remaining invoices and receipts; I answered calls when they came in; I even tidied the room a bit. And all the time the phone was in my pocket with its single missed call. The more I tried to put it out of my mind, the more it occupied it, so that by the middle of the day it was all I could think about. That, and Frances’s secret, the one that had been rotting away inside her and was now out in the open.

I couldn’t call the number because what would I say? Yet if I didn’t call, what had been the point of going to all that effort? Maybe I should try and match the number with one in Milena’s various address books. I started and quickly gave it up as impossible.

I went out to the deli down the road and bought lunch for the two of us: paninis stuffed with roasted vegetables, green pesto and melted mozzarella. While we ate, Beth asked me about my life and quickly shifted the conversation back to hers. We were both more comfortable with that and she told me about the failings of her current boyfriend.

Afterwards I shuffled pieces of paper. I put books back on shelves. I took the phone out of my pocket and laid it on the desk. I put it away again: out of sight, out of mind, I instructed myself sternly. I made more coffee, very strong this time, which I drank while it was still too hot so it burned my tongue and the roof of my mouth. I took the phone out once more, stared at it as if it could talk. I fed unwanted mail through the shredder and watered the plants on the window-sill. When Beth left for the day, I couldn’t stop myself. I took my phone, pulled up the missed-call window and pressed call, then cancelled it immediately.

I pressed the number again and this time I held my nerve. I could hear it ringing now and closed my eyes, swallowing hard, trying to breathe normally in spite of the rushing in my head and the pounding in my ears.

‘Hello?’ said a male voice down the phone. And ‘Hello?’ it said, outside the door.

‘Who…?’ I began in confusion, before realization flooded through me. I jabbed end call and slammed the phone on the desk. It skittered along the shiny surface and clattered to the floor.

‘Hello?’ said the voice outside the door again, irritable now. ‘Are you there? Hello? Hello?’

I was trembling so much I could barely sit upright. The door swung open.

‘Hi, Gwen,’ said David, pushing his mobile back into his pocket.

I pretended I was so hard at work that I hadn’t heard him properly. I stared at some figures and underlined a few. My hands shook and the pen made incomprehensible scrawls across the page. David, I thought. So it was David.

‘Gwen?’

I felt unable to speak coherently. I could barely manage to breathe. But I made myself say something, as if I were a normal human being. ‘David,’ I said, ‘how are you doing?’

Although he had spoken to me, he didn’t seem to hear my reply. He just wandered restlessly around the office. I stared at the paper, and tried to make sense of what I had just learned. There was so much of it that I could only process it in fragments. David was one of Milena’s lovers. Those tender, effusive emails had been from him – he was usually so ironic and amused. Milena had sat in this office reading his messages, writing to him, while Frances had been in the same room just a few feet away. How could he have done it? With her friend and colleague? Right under her nose? How could she have done it? Or was I reading it the wrong way? Was that part of the excitement? They say that there’s no point in gambling for small amounts of money. It has to hurt when you lose. Maybe it’s the same with infidelity. Anyone can have a one-night stand on a business trip, at a conference in another country. The real thrill is doing it like an illusionist, risking discovery at every moment, witnessing your victim’s lack of knowledge.

When I thought of Milena’s messages, the chill of them, the manipulation, I wondered if she was more interested in the power than in the sex. Was sex for her just a demonstration that she could have any man she wanted? That she could triumph over any woman, in any circumstances? Was it likely that Greg could have held out against that? Was he so different from the others?

I tried to remember what David had said to me about Milena and Frances. In all those conversations when I had been lying to him, he had been lying to me, as he had also been lying – had he? – to Johnny and Frances. Well, if he had, he wasn’t the only liar. There was Frances, with her own infidelity. They had been betraying each other.

‘Is Frances around?’

I felt like someone very, very drunk trying to imitate someone sober and not knowing whether the act was convincing or ludicrous. ‘I don’t know,’ I said, enunciating each word carefully. ‘She’s seeing the printers some time this afternoon.’

‘Don’t worry,’ said David. ‘I can phone her.’

I couldn’t stand this any longer. I stood up and reached for my jacket. David gave me the appraising look I always found so hard to read.

‘I’m not driving you away, am I?’

‘I’ve got a meeting,’ I said. ‘I have to go.’

‘At your school?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I said, and stopped myself elaborating. I didn’t want to risk any lies I might trap myself inside. ‘Could you tell Frances I’ll give her a ring?’

I walked to the door. Just as I was opening it, I heard David call my name. What was it? Had I made a mistake?

‘Sorry, Gwen, I forgot.’

‘What?’

‘Do you want to come out to lunch with us tomorrow?’

‘Sure.’

‘Hugo Livingstone’s coming. We thought it would be good if you could join us. What with Milena, Hugo’s in a bad way. It would do him good to meet a friend.’

‘That would be great,’ I said, hearing my voice tremble. ‘Look forward to it.’

All the way home I felt as though I was stained with something. I had turned over a stone and found horrible slimy things, but in the end what did it amount to? What had it really told me? Yet still I felt contaminated by it. When I got home I had a long shower, trying to wash off all the Gwen-ness, all the deceptions and entanglements. I stood there until the tank began to empty and the water turned lukewarm. Afterwards I pulled on a torn pair of jeans and a scraggly old sweater. I went outside into the garden and stood for a while, feeling the cold darkness on my face.

I thought of calling Gwen and asking her to come over, but I knew she was with Daniel tonight. Mary? She was looking after Robin, and I couldn’t abide the thought of talking to her while she held his little body to her chest and cooed into his downy hair. Fergus? He was with Jemma, waiting for the labour pains to begin. Joe? I could call Joe and he’d be over like a shot, with a bottle of whisky and his gruff brand of tenderness, calling me ‘sweetheart’ and making me cry. I almost picked up the phone, but then I had a vision of myself as they must see me: poor Ellie, sucking misery into a room, needy and sad and not moving on, battening on to the lives of others.

So I went back into the kitchen, and first of all I made a phone call to Party Animals, knowing Frances would not be there so all I had to do was leave a message saying I wasn’t coming back and wishing her luck with the future. That done, I opened the small drawer in the table, where I pushed miscellaneous leaflets, flyers, bills, and took out the list that had been given to me all those weeks ago by the police-woman, the leaflet with helpful phone numbers for victims, for the stricken, the harmed, the bereaved, the helpless.

Chapter Twenty-two

Judy Cummings was a short, stocky woman in early middle age. She had abundant coarse dark-brown hair with occasional strands of grey, thick brows over bright brown eyes, and was wrapped in a long, bulky cardigan. Her handshake was firm and brief. I had been dreading the kind of handshake that a grief counsellor might give, which goes on for too long and tries to turn into a condolence, a fake intimacy that would have had me running for the door. But she was almost businesslike. ‘Take a seat, Ellie,’ she said.

The room was small and warm, empty except for three low chairs and a low table on which, I noticed, there was a discreet box of tissues.

‘Thanks.’ I felt awkward, tongue-tied. ‘I don’t know why I’m here,’ I said. ‘I’ve no idea what to say.’

‘Why don’t you start at the beginning,’ she said, ‘and see where that takes you?’

So I began with the knock at the door, on that Monday evening in October. I didn’t look at Judy as I spoke but bent over in my chair and put my hand across my eyes. I didn’t tell her about my amateur-detective work, or about my disbelief that Greg had had an affair. I just talked about losing him: that seemed to take up all the time.

‘I feel so bleak and empty,’ I said at last. ‘I wish I could cry.’

‘I’m sure you will in time.’ Her voice was softer and lower now; the room felt darker, as if the light had faded while I was there and we were in some twilit world. ‘There are so many things going on, aren’t there?’ she continued. ‘Grief, anger, shame, loneliness, fear of the future.’

‘Yes.’

‘And having to see the past differently.’

‘My happiness. I thought I was happy.’

‘Indeed. Even that must seem unreliable. But by coming here you have taken an important step in your journey.’

I took my hand away from my eyes and met her brown gaze.

‘It hurts so badly,’ I said. ‘The journey.’

We arranged to meet the following week, and I went from her to the shops. I had made myself a promise that I would start looking after myself. No more empty cupboards and midnight snacks, eaten standing up, of cheese and handfuls of dry cereal. Regular meals; regular work; honest work. I put pasta, green pesto, rice, Parmesan, olive oil, six eggs, tins of tuna and sardines, lettuce, cucumber and an avocado into my trolley. Muesli. Chicken breasts, salmon fillets – it’s hard to buy for one; everything comes in couple sizes. ‘For sharing’, it said, on the flat bread I added to the rest. Tonight, I thought, I would make myself a simple supper. I would sit at the table and eat it, with a glass of wine. Followed by – I tested it with my thumb for ripeness and put it in the trolley – a mango. I would read a book and go to bed at eleven, turn out the light.

It didn’t happen quite like that, although I started well. I listened to my answering-machine, called Greg’s parents and arranged to see them the following weekend. I checked my mobile and saw that there were three messages and two texts from Frances. Basically, they all said the same thing. I need you. Beth’s away. I’m alone. Please come back. I turned on my new pay-as-you-go mobile and saw that there were three missed calls from the person I now knew to be David. I put on a CD of jazz music, washed the dishes lying in the sink, then marinated one of the chicken breasts in coriander and lemon and put the other in the freezer with the salmon fillets. I got as far as opening the bottle of wine, laying a plate, a knife and a fork on the table, and setting a pan on the hob to heat the oil. But I was interrupted by a knock, so I took the pan off and went to answer.

As the door swung open and I saw who was standing there, I considered slamming it, putting on the chain, running upstairs and pulling the duvet over my head, jamming my fingers in my ears, blocking out the world and all its mess. But even as I thought it, there we stood, face to face, and there was nothing I could do except fix an inane smile in place and hope he couldn’t see the panic behind it.

‘Gwen?’

‘Johnny!’

‘Don’t look so surprised – you didn’t think I was just going to let you disappear, did you? You can’t get away as easily as that.’

‘But how did you know where I lived?’

‘Is it a problem?’

‘No – it’s just I don’t remember telling you.’

‘I heard you give your address to the taxi driver that night. Aren’t you going to invite me in?’

‘Everything’s a mess. Maybe we should go out for a drink instead,’ I said wildly.

‘You’ve seen how I live. Now I’m going to see how you live,’ he said, and stepped over the threshold. ‘It doesn’t look that messy.’

‘I was about to go out.’

‘It looks to me,’ he said, entering the kitchen as if he owned it, ‘as if you were about to make a nice little supper for one. Shall I pour us some wine?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Or yes – yes. Why not? Just half a glass.’

‘So, you like jazz, do you?’

There were envelopes lying on the table with my name on them and I clutched them, crumpling them in my fist. And, oh, God, there was a photograph of me and Greg attached to the fridge by a magnet. I lurched across the room and stood in front of it. Or maybe it didn’t matter if Johnny saw it – did it? I couldn’t think. My brain fizzed and sweat prickled on my forehead. ‘Jazz?’ I said stupidly. ‘Yes.’

My eyes flicked nervously around. There were so many things in this room that could give me away. For instance, lying on the window-sill, and pushed into the frame, were several postcards bearing my name, or even my name and Greg’s. Lying on the floor, just beyond Johnny’s left foot, there was the bit of paper that had been pushed through my door: ‘Where are you, what are you doing and why aren’t you answering my calls? RING ME NOW! Gwenxxxx.’

And then, suddenly, there was the sound of the telephone ringing – and if the answering-machine picked it up someone would be saying loudly and insistently, ‘Ellie, Ellie? Pick up, Ellie.’

‘Just a minute,’ I croaked, and dashed into the hall to pick up the phone.

‘Yes?’ I said. From where I stood, I could see Johnny examining the photo of me and Greg on the fridge.

‘Ellie, it’s me, Gwen.’

‘Gwen,’ I said idiotically. Then, to cover up, I said it again, neutrally, as if I was explaining my identity to the caller: ‘Gwen here.’

‘What? This is Gwen.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘Can I come over?’

‘What? Now?’

‘The thing is, it’s Daniel, and I wasn’t going to confide in you because of, you know, everything, but then I thought it wasn’t fair on you or me, because after all –’

‘Hang on. Sorry. Listen. You have to come over, of course you do, but give me half an hour.’

‘If it’s a problem…’

‘It’s not.’ Fuck, was he going to look at the postcards now? ‘Half an hour, my dearest friend. Got to go. ’Bye.’

I slammed down the phone, but picked it up again and left it off the hook so nobody else could call. Then I tore back to the kitchen.

‘I can’t be long,’ I said to Johnny, putting my hand on his shoulder so he turned away from the postcards on the window-sill. ‘Come and sit in the living room to finish your wine.’

‘Who’s the guy you were with in that photo?’ he asked, as we sat down – he on the sofa and me in the chair, and oh, no, no, no, the chart on the table just beyond him. Couldn’t he see? Even from here, Milena’s name, in capitals and neatly underlined, throbbed in my field of vision.

‘Someone I used to know.’

‘He looks familiar. Could I have met him?’

‘No.’

‘Is he why you’re so evasive?’

No point in beating round the bush. ‘Yes. I’m sorry, Johnny. The thing is – and I should have said this before – I’m not ready for another relationship.’

‘So that’s it?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘You think you can behave like that and get away with it?’

‘I didn’t mean to hurt you.’

‘You’re all the same,’ he said, standing up. Now he was even nearer the chart. I willed him to look my way and he did, resentment burning in his eyes.

‘I’m not coming back to work,’ I said. ‘It was all a mistake. So you won’t have to see me again.’

‘I felt sorry for you. You seemed so sad.’

‘Johnny…’

‘I thought you liked me.’

‘I do.’

‘Women are so good at pretending. Like her. Milena.’

‘I don’t think I’m like Milena in any way,’ I said. ‘We’re opposites.’

‘That’s what I thought, too, when I met you,’ he said. ‘Maybe that’s why I liked you – you seemed calm and kind. But I was wrong. You’re both actresses. You take on roles.’ I stared at him, panic flowing through my veins. ‘I’ve seen the way you are with Frances – Ms Capable. You led her on and made her depend on you; she thinks you’re her friend. Milena could do that too, be all things to all people. Everything was a mask. You thought you’d got a glimpse of the real Milena and all of a sudden you understood it was just another mask. I’ve never forgotten one time when she was talking to a very nice Muslim man about Ramadan, which had begun that very evening, and he was explaining how he couldn’t eat after sunrise or before sunset. She was so sympathetic and intelligent about it that I thought I was seeing a new side to her. Then an hour or so later, when we were together at my flat, she went on this extraordinary rant against Islam and its believers. She was so witheringly contemptuous of the man she’d been so sweet to. It was like a window into her soul.’

‘Johnny…’

‘I said to myself then that I should kick her out, that she would only bring me grief. Of course I didn’t, though: she stayed all evening and all night and I made her eggs Benedict for brunch.’ He laughed bitterly. ‘Never believe women. Especially when they’re being nice to you.’

‘That’s not fair,’ I began. But I didn’t have time to argue with him. Gwen was on her way, the real Gwen. ‘You should go,’ I said.

‘I haven’t finished my wine.’

‘I really think you should go.’

‘Let me cook that meal for you.’

‘No.’

‘You’re lonely and I’m lonely and at least we can give each other –’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I haven’t been fair. We can’t give each other anything.’

‘Dumping me, dumping Frances, moving on. That it?’

‘Stop it,’ I said. ‘We weren’t married. We slept with each other twice. It was a mistake. I apologize. Now you have to go.’

He put his glass down on top of the chart. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Right.’ He stared at me. ‘You’re not how I thought you’d be.’

Three minutes after Johnny had left, Gwen arrived. She burst into tears on the doorstep and I pulled her into the house, shut the door and hugged her until her sobs subsided. ‘I’m such an idiot,’ she said.

‘What’s he done?’

‘Nothing.’ And she gave a long, disconsolate sniff.

‘Come and tell me about this nothing. I’ll make us supper, unless you’ve eaten already. Wine? I’ve got an open bottle.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Tell me, then.’

‘He was with this woman for ages and she went off with one of his mates. It took him ages to get over it. You’ve met him – he’s such a big softie. Anyway, she got in touch with him because that relationship’s over. He’s with her now, “comforting” her. I think she wants him back.’

‘He told you all this?’

‘Not the last bit.’

‘Does he want to go back to her?’

‘He swears it’s me he wants. But I don’t know whether to believe him. You know my luck with men. Can I have a tissue?’

‘Help yourself. Here’s your wine.’

‘Am I being an idiot?’

‘Who am I to say? All I’m sure of is that he’d be an idiot to leave you – and by the sound of it he’s being totally straightforward with you. Plus he seems pretty devoted to you.’

‘Do you think so?’

‘All I know is what he looked like to me: kind, honourable, besotted.’

‘Yes. Sorry. I don’t know what came over me. I was sitting alone in my flat and suddenly I couldn’t bear it.’

‘I understand.’

‘It’s been so nice, being in a couple.’

Gwen gave me a hug. We chinked glasses. I cooked the chicken and divided it between us with a bag of salad leaves. It was rather a tiny meal for two emotionally drained and ravenous women, but we finished off with the mango and lots of chocolate bourbons, then sat on the sofa together with my duvet over us and watched a DVD before I called a cab to take her home.

I woke with a start and looked at the clock beside me. It was just past three. I must have been dreaming about Greg, because I had an image of him throwing grapes into the air and trying to catch them in his mouth but they spun everywhere. Perhaps what Johnny had said about fasting at Ramadan had prompted it. It had been a comic dream, but happy. I lay in the dark and tried to hold the picture in my mind.

I woke again at five. Something was bothering me, a wisp of a thought I couldn’t get a hold of. Something I had seen? Something someone had said? And just as I stopped trying to remember, and sleep was pulling me down again, it came to me.

I got out of bed and pulled on my dressing-gown. It was very cold in the house. I went to the computer and turned it on, and when it came to life, I Googled ‘Ramadan’. I knew it always took place during the ninth month of the year; this year it had begun on 12 September.

How long did I sit there, staring at the date? I don’t know, perhaps not so long. Time seemed to slow right down. At last I went into the living room and stood in front of my chart. Johnny’s empty wine glass was still on top of it. I took it off and looked very carefully at all the grids. My breath sounded loud in the silent room. I went to the drawer of my desk and pulled out the menu card Fergus had given me, stared at the date at the top and at the scrawled message: ‘Darling G, you were wonderful this evening. Next time stay the night and I can show you more new tricks!’

The evening of 12 September was the one and only time that I knew for sure Greg had been with Milena. But now I also knew he hadn’t, because she had been with Johnny.

Chapter Twenty-three

I was tempted to cancel my next appointment with the counsellor. I didn’t, but when I arrived I felt I was there under false pretences, which was how I felt almost everywhere I went and whatever I did. She sat me down and then sat opposite me, but not in an inquisitorial way. ‘So, how has your week been, Ellie?’ she asked.

I considered saying, ‘Fine,’ and leaving it at that. But then I decided that there, in that protected space, I would make an attempt at telling the truth, although nothing like the whole truth. ‘You talked about me being on a sort of journey,’ I said. ‘I think I’ve gone backwards a bit. In fact, quite a lot.’

She looked puzzled. ‘How do you mean?’

‘Last week you asked me if I accepted that my husband, Greg, had been unfaithful. I said I did. That was an incredibly hard step for me to take. Now I’ve taken another hard step, which is to go back from that. I’m not sure any more. In fact, I think it’s possible that he wasn’t.’

Judy didn’t look cross. I continued before she had a chance to speak, because I knew that there was worse to admit to and that I’d better get it all out of the way. As I spoke, she watched me.

‘I’ve come straight from the police station,’ I said. ‘I phoned them up and made an appointment to see a detective. Before, I’d mainly seen this female police officer. I suspect she was assigned to me to hold my hand and calm me down as a sort of amateur therapist. This time I made sure I had a proper meeting with someone who had the authority to make decisions.

‘I’m going to be honest with you, even if it makes me seem crazier than you already think I am.’ I paused and waited for Judy to interrupt and say she didn’t really think I was crazy, but she didn’t, so I continued. ‘It would have been much easier to prove Greg had had an affair with this woman, and in fact I did find that proof, or at least I thought I did. Are you going to ask what the proof was?’

Judy seemed confused. ‘I’m not sure it’s really my function,’ she said.

‘It was a note written on a menu, a menu for a particular date, referring to that date. It looked like evidence that there really had been an affair and that somehow he’d managed to conceal it from me. It should have been a relief, and maybe it was. But I’ve since found out…’ I felt a rush of horror, as if an abyss had opened at my feet, at the idea of telling Judy the details of how I had found out. ‘I won’t go into the details, but suffice to say that I now know, without any doubt, that on that day Milena couldn’t have been sleeping with my husband because she was sleeping with someone else. And discovering that left me with a problem – two problems, actually. The first was that I just couldn’t give this up and get on with my life. The second was that once I trusted Greg again, the proof got much harder and more complicated.’

I wanted to be as honest as I could, so I told Judy about how I had constructed the charts, how I had cross-referenced them and how, this morning, I had wrapped them up in a giant folder and lugged them into the police station. I had been taken into an interview room and then I had unwrapped them in front of the startled gaze of the young detective. I had taken him through the most important details while he had consulted his own pretty skimpy file.

‘I knew I wasn’t going to convince them,’ I told Judy finally. ‘What was it that someone said? In order to understand me, you have to agree with me. For the police, the most important aspect of the case is that it’s closed and a line has been drawn under it. They don’t care about truth; it’s a matter of statistics. If they reopened the case and solved it, their statistics would look the same as they do now, except that they would have done a great deal more work.’

Judy looked at her watch.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Am I boring you?’

‘I was going to say that our time is up,’ she said. ‘I make it a rule to be very strict about that. I find it’s helpful if the participants know that the time is limited. But just this once I’m going to continue for a few minutes. What did the detective say?’

‘He said lots of things, all negative. He looked carefully at my charts and then he called for another detective to come and look at them as well, but I think that wasn’t because he found them interesting or convincing. It’s more likely that he thought it was all so bizarre that someone else needed to witness it so they wouldn’t think he was making it up when he told them about it in the pub later. What he said was the sort of thing that people have been saying all along. Namely, that I haven’t proved Greg and Milena weren’t having an affair. I’ve just proved they weren’t on those particular days. And then he said that maybe they weren’t having an affair, and if they weren’t he hoped that would be of some comfort to me.

‘We had a bit of an animated discussion about that. I said I hadn’t even found evidence that they knew each other. He said if it came to that, they didn’t even have to have known each other. They might have met for the first time that day. He might have given her a lift for no reason at all. I tried to point out that there was a problem with that: there was a note from Milena to Greg, which I had found in Greg’s possession, about a sexual encounter on a day when they couldn’t – absolutely couldn’t – have had one. Didn’t he think that was a problem?’

‘What was his response?’ asked Judy.

‘You’re a psychologist,’ I said.

‘Actually I’m a psychiatrist.’

‘It’s the same thing.’

‘Well…’

‘You must know that when people have adopted a position in a controversy, if they encounter evidence that contradicts it, that just entrenches them more strongly in the view they already hold. He had no answer to that. Well, no real answer. He just said every case had aspects to it that didn’t fit together and it was never possible to dot every i and cross every t. He saw no reason to reopen the case and he might even have said something about my needing to get a life or some cliché like that. He made it painfully clear that he didn’t want to see any more of me or my theory. So I gathered up my charts and left, and now I’m here telling you about it and I don’t expect you to be any more sympathetic than Detective Inspector Carter was.’

‘There’s one thing I don’t understand,’ said Judy.

‘What’s that?’

‘How did you compile the chart about Milena?’ said Judy. ‘I can understand how you could reconstruct the movements of your husband, but how could you do it for someone you didn’t know?’

I cursed myself silently. Lying was so much harder than telling the truth because the truth fitted together automatically. ‘It wasn’t exactly a chart,’ I said in desperation. ‘I had bits of information from here and there.’

Judy leaned towards me and her face took on a shrewd expression. ‘Ellie, are there things you’re not telling me?’

‘Not relevant things,’ I said, with an uneasy sense that, as I spoke, my nose ought to have been growing like Pinocchio’s.

There was a silence during which Judy looked at her watch again.

‘I should probably go,’ I said.

‘What would you say if you were sitting where I’m sitting listening to you?’

‘I’d probably think I was mad,’ I said. ‘But, then, when I’ve heard a tape of myself speaking I’ve always hated my voice. It sounds different from the inside. In the end, I don’t really care about convincing other people. I knew the police wouldn’t be interested, but I felt I had a responsibility as a citizen to tell them what I’d discovered. I need to know the truth. It’s as simple as that. As long as I know, I don’t care what else happens.’

‘Ellie, I once had a patient, a woman, and her child was ill with cancer and after a time she died. There was a suggestion that the early signs of the disease might have been missed by the doctors. The father became obsessed with this while his child was still alive. He started a campaign and took legal action, and he fought the case for years. I think it may still be going through the courts even. He took early retirement from his job. The case became his job, really. I was never quite sure of the rights and wrongs of it but the result was that the time he should have spent with his child, when time was precious, and later mourning after her death, was spent going to meetings, filing files and writing letters. He kept telling his wife he wanted something good to come out of their child’s experience, but to the wife it just felt as if he was avoiding facing up to what had happened and living through it. He kept busy so he wouldn’t have to stop and think and feel.’

‘His efforts might have changed procedures so that other children were saved,’ I said. ‘And you wanted him to give it up just so that he and his wife could feel better. Anyway, I’m not like that man. I don’t have a dying child to nurse. I don’t have a partner I might be neglecting. The only way I could neglect my husband now would be to allow people to have the wrong idea about him when he’s dead and can’t speak for himself.’

‘If you believe that, why are you here?’ asked Judy. ‘You know I’m not a policeman. I’m not someone who can evaluate evidence or discuss the legalities. I’m a person who helps people heal. So they don’t have to go out into the world and do things, they don’t have to set things right or revenge themselves on their enemies. They simply give themselves permission to be normal.’

‘That’s why I came,’ I said. ‘It’s like a reminder. You’re a reminder to me that there’s another way of living. It’s like someone who’s incredibly depressed trying to remind themselves that there will be a time in the future when things don’t look as they do now. There’ll come a time when I’ll buy shoes and meet people for drinks and flirt and be a good friend again…’

‘You make being normal sound frivolous.’

‘I don’t mean to. What I mean is that coming here is like looking through a window at a garden I’d love to go into and that maybe I will some day. But for the moment I’m not giving myself permission to be normal, quite the opposite. I’m giving myself permission to be abnormal. I’m going to stick with my charts and my conspiracy theories and I’m not going to play the part of the grieving widow who’s accepting and passive and basically invisible.’

Judy shook her head. ‘It doesn’t work like that,’ she said. ‘These aren’t just roles you can choose between. You can’t put off healing as if it were a foreign holiday.’

I thought for the moment. ‘Maybe I’m on holiday now,’ I said. ‘A holiday from being normal and nice and what everybody wants me to be.’

‘It’s called grief,’ said Judy.

‘No, it isn’t,’ I said. ‘The grief comes later, when I know what I’m grieving for.’

Chapter Twenty-four

There were some things, however, that I couldn’t put off, no matter how much I wanted to. ‘I’m dreading it,’ I said to Gwen on the phone, just before I left. ‘Why am I dreading it quite so much? It’s almost like a phobia.’

‘Then don’t go. Say you’re ill.’

‘I might as well get it over with.’

I’d seen Greg’s mother and father at the funeral, and spoken to them briefly twice since then, I’d erased several of their messages from my answering-machine, along with some from his brothers and his sister Kate. I had tried not to think about them because I knew that, whatever I was going through, it was probably worse for them. No parent should ever bury a child. Greg was their first-born. However they had treated him when he was alive – his father had patronized him, bullied him and lost his temper with him, while his mother had compared him unfavourably to his more conservative and prosperous siblings – they had loved him in their fashion. And presumably it made it still more painful to have lost him before they had had a chance to become reconciled. Their last words (Paul had accused Greg of being part of the selfish generation who hadn’t even given his parents grandchildren yet) had been bitter and heated.

They were waiting for me at Bristol Temple Meads station, and I climbed into the back of the car before leaning forward to kiss their cheeks and hand over the flowers I’d bought.

‘You’re a bit late,’ said Paul, starting the car and fiddling with his rear-view mirror, so that for an instant I found myself gazing straight into his slightly bloodshot eyes.

‘The train was delayed.’

‘You’d have done better to drive.’

‘I don’t have a car,’ I said. The fact hung in the air between us. I didn’t have a car because Greg had died in it. With someone else.

‘You’re looking well,’ said Kitty, unenthusiastically, as the car drew away from the kerb and joined the queue nosing out on to the main road.

‘Thanks.’ I knew I wasn’t. ‘You too, Kitty. How have you been?’

She turned in her seat and gave me her plaintive smile. ‘I’ve got a bit of a sniffle this morning. I think I’m coming down with a cold.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that. But I meant since Greg’s death.’

‘Oh,’ she said, flummoxed. Paul coughed. Clearly Greg’s death was a taboo subject.

‘It’s been hard,’ said Kitty. ‘Very hard. Especially with –’ She stopped dead. Her eyes filled with tears and she started fiddling nervously with her hair.

‘With him dying with another woman?’ I suggested.

Paul coughed again, then said, ‘Here we are. Our humble abode.’

The house was scrupulously tidy and filled with objects Paul and Kitty had collected over the years: the teddy bears on the sofa, the thimbles in the glass cabinet, the snow domes ranged along the mantel, the glass cats on top of the piano that nobody had played since Greg had left home at eighteen. There were photos on the window-sill, and while Kitty went off to get lunch for us, I examined them. ‘Where have all the photos of Greg gone?’ I asked Paul.

He gave his short cough. ‘We thought you might like them. I’ve put them in a bag for you to take, with things like his school reports.’

‘But don’t you want them? I mean, now more than ever, I would have thought –’

‘This has been painful for his mother,’ he interrupted me. ‘The photographs upset her.’

Kitty called from the kitchen, announcing lunch. As we sat down to eat, I made myself say what I had come to say. It came out sounding too much like a prepared speech. ‘One of the reasons I’m here is that I wanted to give you some things of Greg’s as keepsakes, Ian, Simon and Kate as well as you two. Just books, mostly ones I thought you might like. There are photos too. But if you don’t want them…’

‘Well,’ said Paul. He blinked at me. ‘We can have a look at least.’

‘I brought you his one and only tie.’

‘Paul’s very particular about his ties,’ said Kitty. ‘Nothing fancy.’

‘I just thought it would be a memento.’

We were sitting on three sides of the small table, with a curried egg salad in the middle, and the fourth – where Greg should have been, his complicit smile meant just for me – empty. Kitty divided the salad neatly into three and put my portion on the plate in front of me. I could feel her eyes on me. She and Paul had never taken to me: my job was too odd, not a proper job at all, really; my clothes were strange; they didn’t approve of my opinions, which was strange because I’d never thought of myself as someone who had them. Yet now here I was, the publicly wronged and tragically widowed daughter-in-law.

‘Aren’t you hungry, Ellie?’ said Kitty.

‘This is lovely.’ I took a determined bite of my egg and swallowed it with an effort. ‘I just wanted to say that it seems strange to me that we’ve never talked about what happened.’

Paul looked grim and embarrassed and didn’t speak.

‘I didn’t like to ask Greg about things,’ said Kitty, placidly. ‘If he had come to me and said he wasn’t happy I would have listened. I’m his mother after all. I suppose he must have had his reasons for doing what he did.’

‘Our marriage was very happy,’ I said, pushing the plate away.

The two of them exchanged a glance.

‘It must be hard for you to bear,’ said Kitty.

‘I don’t need to bear it,’ I said. ‘That’s another reason why I’m here today. I wanted to tell you that Greg was a good man. He was the most loving husband.’ I looked at the clock on the wall: I had only been there for twenty-five minutes. When could I decently leave? ‘I trusted him.’ Then I corrected myself: ‘I trust him.’

‘It was awful,’ I said to Joe, who had insisted on taking time off work to pick me up from the station and drive me home, even though it would have been much quicker to catch the Underground, and even though I didn’t want to go home. It was warm and luxurious inside the BMW and I sank gratefully back into the seat.

He grinned and put a hand on my knee. I pretended it wasn’t there and eventually he moved it to change gear.

‘I’ll bet it was,’ he said. ‘I’ve met them, remember? How Greg came from a family like that I’ll never know. At least you’ve done your duty.’

‘I took them books they didn’t want, photos they gave back, and memories they were trying to erase. We all hated every minute of it.’

‘What are you doing later?’

‘This and that.’

‘Are you working?’

‘A little,’ I said evasively.

‘Good. You need to get back to things, Ellie.’

‘You’re probably right.’

‘You look a bit tired. Have you been okay?’

‘Some days are better than others.’

‘If you ever want someone to talk to…’

‘I’ve talked enough. I just go over and over the same things. There’s nothing left to say that I haven’t said already.’

‘Are you all right for money?’

‘What?’

‘Money,’ he repeated. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Fine, I think. As far as I know. I haven’t gone through everything. I’ve let things slide. Greg and I weren’t big savers, but we didn’t spend much either.’

‘I can give you some. Lend,’ he corrected himself hastily. ‘If there’s a cash-flow problem.’

‘That’s good of you. But I’ll be all right.’

The car pulled up outside my house. I went to kiss his cheek but he turned his face and, before I had a chance to pull away, kissed me on the lips. I pushed him away. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

‘I’m kissing you.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. You’re my friend. And you were Greg’s friend. And you’re married to Alison. Who knows what you get up to behind her back? But not with me.’

‘Sorry, sorry, sorry,’ he said, with a groan that was also a half-laugh. ‘I don’t know what came over me. You’re a lovely woman.’

‘Do you pounce on every lovely woman?’

He held up his hands in mock-surrender, trying to make it into a joke. ‘Just the ones I can’t resist.’

‘Poor Alison,’ I said, and saw a flash of anger cross his face.

‘Alison’s fine. We have a good marriage.’

‘I’m going to forget it happened,’ I said. ‘Don’t ever do that again.’

‘I won’t. Sorry, sweetheart.’

I looked at him as if he were a strange, exotic specimen I’d observed. ‘Is it easy?’

‘What?’

‘To have an affair and then go home at night.’

‘You make it sound as if I do it all the time.’

‘Do you?’

‘Of course not! You know me.’

‘What about at the moment? Is there anyone?’

‘No!’ But something in his voice, in his expression, told me he was lying.

‘Come on, Joe – who?’

‘No one.’

‘I know there is. Is she married?’

‘You’ve got a one-track mind. Ever since Greg died, you’ve been on the look-out for adultery and deception.’

‘Someone from work? Someone I know? It is, isn’t it?’

‘Ellie.’ He was half laughing, as if this was a great joke.

‘Oh, God, I know who it is.’

‘This is ridiculous. I don’t know what you’re on about.’

‘It’s Tania, isn’t it?’

‘No!’

‘Joe?’

‘It’s nothing, I promise. But she’s so young and eager.’

‘Oh God, Joe,’ I said. I felt anger well inside me as I gazed at his handsome, rugged face, his smiling mouth. ‘She’s half your age.’

‘Maybe that’s the point, Ellie,’ he said. ‘And maybe you should stop judging everyone.’

‘I don’t.’

‘You do, and I understand why.’

‘I don’t mean to. I just can’t bear to think of Alison getting hurt.’

‘She won’t, I promise. And that – just now –’ he gestured round the car as if the kiss was still floating in the air ‘– that was wrong of me. Greg’s death has left me feeling at a loss. Forgive me.’

After he had driven away I entered my house, but only to dump the shopping bag of Greg’s effects I’d brought back from his parents. Then I walked to the Underground station, eyes watering in the easterly wind. In spite of everything I made up my mind to go back to Party Animals, and I couldn’t bear to wait, even though I wasn’t sure what I would do there, except more snooping.

The first train was thirteen minutes away, and I wanted to weep with impatience. I paced up and down the platform. I had three new pieces to add to Life’s Most Difficult Jigsaw Puzzle: Milena had been having an affair with Frances’s husband; Johnny had been with Milena on the one night when I had evidence to show that she was with Greg; the menu card with Milena’s note written to Greg and finally discovered by Fergus tucked inside a book was therefore…

I stopped, my brain hurting with the effort of holding together all the information that wanted to fly in different directions. Therefore what? Therefore a typo, a tease, a slip of the pen, a red herring, a mistake, a contradiction, a fraud, a mystery – something manufactured to drive me mad.

I rang the bell, and when Frances didn’t answer the door, let myself in with the key I still had. I called from the top of the stairs. The basement light was on. I knew Beth was away on holiday, so I thought that Frances was probably about, but there was no answer. I went down, wriggling out of my coat as I did so, pulling off my scarf, tossing them both over the easy chair as I came into the room.

Frances had obviously been there earlier and was expecting to return. The radiator was warm, the Anglepoise lamp over her desk was turned on, although the rest of the room was in shadow, and there was a mug beside her computer, as well as her glasses and several glossy holiday brochures with exotic destinations.

I prowled restlessly round the office, pulling random books off the shelves. I opened the drawers of Frances’s desk and peered inside: a drawer for receipts, one for stationery, another for an assortment of old menus, leaflets and empty bottles. I felt more than usually uneasy now that I knew David had had an affair with Milena, and Frances had had an affair with – with who? The ghastly suspicions I had were eating away at me, although I knew I was probably being ridiculous. Frances, with a husband who cheated on her under her nose with her business partner, and a woman she thought of as a friend who had snuck in under false pretences, gained her confidence, and now spent her time digging out her most intimate secrets.

Eventually I sat down at Milena’s large desk, switched on the side lamp, and turned on her computer, drumming my fingers on the keyboard as I waited for it to boot up. It was very quiet. I could hear the radiators hum and the wind blow against the glass. Every so often, a car passed or a door slammed, far off. It was quite dark outside now, and the room was dim apart from the two pools of light cast by the lamps. I had a sudden overwhelming urge to be back in my down-at-heel little house – not on my own, though; not in the lonely here and now. I wanted to be there with Greg, blinds drawn, the kettle boiling, him singing loudly and tunelessly and asking what we should eat for supper, reading out crossword clues that neither of us ever got, putting his arms round me from behind and resting his chin on the top of my head. My world of safety, no matter how scary it was outside.

I shivered and concentrated on the screen, typing in Milena’s password, accessing once more her hectic private life. I heard footsteps on the pavement drawing nearer, then receding. A dog barked. I clicked once more on the messages from David and stared at them, as if some secret was hidden between the lines.

‘Oh, God, Greg,’ I said out loud, and leaned forward, rolling the chair a bit closer to the desk and resting my head on my arms. My foot touched something solid. I sat up and pushed the chair back again. I bent down, just a little, to see what was there.

A boot, lying lengthways, but a boot wasn’t heavy, was it? Two boots, black with elegant pointed toes and small, sharp heels. The room shifted around me; the walls seemed to close in. There was a sour taste in my mouth. I bent down further. I heard a gasp, and it had come from me but it didn’t sound like me. I stood up, the floor tipping beneath me, sweat prickling on my forehead, and held on to the desk to steady myself. Then I saw. Her body lay bundled under the desk, but her head stuck out, and her eyes were looking up at me. I staggered back, my hand over my mouth. I closed my eyes, but when I opened them again, she was still there: how could I have missed seeing her until now?

I don’t know how long I stood there, almost gagging, staring into the sightless eyes. But gradually thought returned. First, I had to make sure she was dead. I knew she was – you don’t have to be familiar with death to recognize it – but I had to check. I crouched and dragged the body clear of the desk. It was heavy and awkward. I put my ear against her mouth and felt no breathing; I put my thumb where the pulse should have been and felt nothing. There were bruises on her throat and her lips were faintly blue. The sight struck fresh horror into me, even though I had known from the moment I’d seen the body bundled under the desk that this was no accidental death. I gave a few feeble presses on her chest, all the time certain that it was useless. And yet she was warm. Not so many minutes ago she must have been alive. I held her head in my hands and gazed at her thin, intelligent face, her blind, open eyes. Frances stared up at me. Her beautiful linen skirt had risen up above her knees. I saw that her legs were the legs of an ageing woman, and her face had lines and creases I hadn’t noticed before. There were tiny strands of grey in her highlighted hair. Her wrists were thin. A thought spiked through me: perhaps the killer was still there. Fear turned me cold and shivery; my legs shook and when I stood up they would barely hold me. I listened. I heard the radiators still humming, the far-off noise of the main road.

As quietly and calmly as I could, I put on my coat and scarf. I walked across the room, eased the front door open, closed it softly behind me and went out into the street without looking back. I wasn’t sure if there were other people around. I wasn’t aware of them but there was nothing about me that would make them remember.

My first impulse was to escape, to return home, to pretend I hadn’t been there. But I thought of Frances. Had I made sure she was really dead? It felt as if it had happened years before and to someone who wasn’t quite me. I had felt her pulse. She had looked dead. Could I be sure? Weren’t there people who had been revived long after they were apparently dead? As I turned out of Tulser Road on to the bustling main street I saw a phone box that hadn’t been vandalized. I could dial 999 without having to put money in. Some strange bit at the back of my mind remembered that 999 calls were recorded, so I tried to make my voice different from normal, a bit muffled. I asked for an ambulance and said that someone was badly hurt, maybe dead, then I gave the address. When the woman asked for my name I said I couldn’t hear, it was a bad line and hung up. Before I reached the Underground station, I heard the siren of an ambulance, though I didn’t see it. I didn’t know if it was the one I had summoned. In London, you hear so many.

When I reached the station, my hand was suddenly trembling so much that I couldn’t extract the Oyster card from my purse, and when I managed it I dropped it and bent down to fumble for it. A young man stopped to help me and looked at me worriedly. When he asked me if I was all right, I couldn’t speak properly. He must have thought I was on some strong medication. It took a supreme effort to do the simple things, to catch the train in the right direction, to get off at my stop. All the time a thought was repeating in my head, like a tic, like a dripping tap, like a rattling window: Frances is dead, Frances is dead.

When I arrived home I went straight upstairs and pulled off my clothes, just letting them fall, and got into a bath. I lay there for more than an hour, letting water out as it cooled and refilling it with hot, only my face protruding. If I had had the choice, I would have lain there for the rest of my life, warm and wet and safe. I scrubbed my face. I washed my hair and then I cut my toe- and fingernails as if I was purifying myself. Finally, reluctantly, I got out and put on what had become my normal domestic outfit of old jeans, baggy sweatshirt and slippers.

Then I started to clean the house. From cupboards and shelves I retrieved every bottle of bleach and disinfectant and polish in the house. With cloths and brushes and sprays, I scoured and scraped every surface. I filled two large bin-bags with rubbish and things that weren’t quite rubbish and things that weren’t really rubbish at all but that I thought I’d be better off without or that I could do without. I thought of one of my grandmothers – my father’s mother – who had seemingly spent her entire adult life cleaning. Even the thought of her conjured up a smell of pine-scented air-freshener. For her, cleanliness was a form of display, a recurrent demonstration that she had the cleanest lavatory of all of her friends. For me it was about purifying, cutting away, eliminating.

I checked the time. It was just after seven. When I had got rid of ten items of clothing, I could have a drink. It was easy. I instantly disposed of clothes I’d kept out of sentiment, because I’d worn them as a teenager or at college, or I’d been given them by a boyfriend or bought them in a particular place, that time in Queensland or Seville. As I crammed them into another bin-bag, I saw that I had put in far more than ten. Twenty at least. I deserved an extra large drink as a reward for that. And if I drank a whole bottle of wine, I could throw away the bottle.

There were eight in the little rack in the kitchen. I found the oldest wine I had. We’d bought it in France a couple of years earlier for what had seemed a lot of money at the time, ten or twenty euros. It had been for a special occasion that had never come. I opened it and poured myself a glass. I sipped. It tasted bitter. Was it corked? I’d never quite known what that meant. It would do, though. Perhaps it needed to be drunk with food. I didn’t have anything that seemed suitable so I toasted some bread and spread butter on it. I munched the toast and finished the glass of wine. Then I looked in the cupboard and found a tin of olives I’d forgotten. I opened the tin and cut my finger on the lid. I wrapped a tissue round it and poured myself another glass of wine. I ate an olive. Everything I ate, everything I drank, was emptying the house just a little more.

When the doorbell rang, I hadn’t quite finished the second glass of wine, but I still felt lightheaded. I opened the door. It was Johnny.

‘You’d better come in,’ I said wearily.

He walked inside, and although he’d been there before he was looking around him as if he was seeing it for the first time. I picked up my glass. ‘I’m drinking,’ I said. ‘You want some?’

‘All right.’

I poured him some wine and handed it to him. He took a gulp and pulled an approving face. He picked up the bottle and studied it. Then he raised his eyes and looked me squarely in the face. ‘Have you heard about Frances?’ he said.

‘What? Tell me.’

‘She’s dead. She was murdered.’ There was a pause. ‘You don’t look shocked.’

‘I knew.’

‘How?’

‘I found the body,’ I said. ‘I called the ambulance.’

Johnny was visibly startled. He stepped back as if I’d struck him. ‘You did? Then why weren’t you there when they arrived? Why didn’t you talk to the police?’

‘I came straight home.’

‘Why?’

‘I wasn’t ready to talk about it.’

‘I don’t think it works like that,’ he said. ‘When you find a body, you’re meant to stick around, you know, talk to the police, that sort of thing.’

‘There’s too much to explain.’

‘Is there now?’ He raised his eyebrows and a shiver of apprehension ran through me. ‘David rang me. One of the things he said was that the police want to talk to everybody involved. Apparently they’re having trouble tracking you down. For someone who’s been working in the office for several weeks, you haven’t left much trace.’

‘I wasn’t on the books,’ I said.

‘No address. No phone number.’

‘You’ve got my address,’ I said. ‘Why didn’t you tell them?’

I had a sudden sense of alarm. Had I miscalculated? Did anybody know that Johnny knew me? Did David?

‘Is there any reason why I shouldn’t?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’ve been thinking about it.’

Johnny frowned at me. ‘I don’t understand this and neither do I like it. Not one bit. You found the body. What’s the problem with talking to the police about it? Don’t you want to help them? And why are you so difficult to track down? Is there anything you want to tell me?’

It may have been the memory of Frances’s body in my arms or the wine or the sheer tiredness, but I couldn’t spin any more lies, not just then. But I took a deep breath before I spoke, because I felt I was stepping out into a different sort of world and I was scared. My skin was cold with fear.

‘I’m not Gwen,’ I said.

‘I don’t understand. What does that mean, you’re not Gwen?’

‘It means that my name isn’t Gwen. There is a Gwen Abbott. She’s a friend of mind. I borrowed her name. Stole it.’

‘I…’ He stopped, his mouth hanging open as he stared at me.

‘My real name is Eleanor. Eleanor Falkner.’

‘You mean you were lying?’ he said. ‘All the time?’

‘Yes.’

‘So when we were in bed together and I called you Gwen and you just… I don’t know what to say.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘It got out of hand.’

Johnny gave a horrible laugh. ‘Got out of hand?’

‘I didn’t mean it like that.’

He sat down heavily and some of his wine splashed on to the sofa. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed at it. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘You’ll want to put salt on that.’

‘It’s a crappy old sofa.’

‘So, Eleanor.’ Johnny said my name as if it was one he’d never heard before, from a different language, hard to pronounce. ‘Why did you do this? Or should I just call the police?’

I thought for a moment and then I went and sat beside him on the sofa. I told him he could call the police if he wanted, but first… And then I told him everything I could, not like a proper story but in a mess of fragments, all out of order, with additions and little explanations. I told him about Greg. I even fetched the picture of the two of us together. Johnny had seen me naked, slept with me, but now I felt even more naked, even more exposed to him. I told him about my connection to Milena. At first he asked questions, but as I continued he became quieter, his expression darker. When I finished he was silent for a long time.

‘I don’t even know where to start,’ he said. ‘How could you do such a thing? How could you lie to so many people?’

‘I didn’t plan it,’ I said. ‘Really I just wanted to see where Milena worked. I got invited in and it developed a momentum of its own.’

‘Just to take one example, almost entirely at random, you used me to get the password so that you could read Milena’s secret mail, things she wanted nobody to see.’

‘I didn’t plan things. I didn’t plan us. But she died with my husband. I needed to know everything I could.’

‘So I was just a step on that road,’ said Johnny. ‘Something a bit like Milena’s password.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t like that at all. I wasn’t using you. It was something that happened and I didn’t stop it happening – I still don’t know why.’

He looked at me with a sharper expression. ‘So it meant something to you?’ he said. ‘It wasn’t just to find out about Milena.’

‘No! But it was wrong all the same. I was so hurt and so confused and I should never have slept with you. It wasn’t fair.’

‘But you did. And now someone has been killed.’

‘Yes.’

‘Perhaps because you came and stirred things up.’

‘I’ve thought of that.’

Johnny put the glass down and then put his hands on my face, ran them down to my neck. I willed myself to stay entirely still, although my skin was crawling with dread. ‘So who do you think killed her?’ he said at last.

‘I don’t know.’

‘What if it was me?’

‘Was it?’ I asked.

He raised his right hand from my neck and slapped me across the face so hard that tears came to my eyes. I didn’t speak.

‘That’s for lying to me,’ he said. He got up.

‘Wait,’ I said, as he turned to go. ‘I need to show you something.’

‘What?’

I went over to the little chest, opened the drawer and drew out the menu card. Without saying anything I passed it to him and he stared at it.

‘I don’t understand,’ he said eventually. ‘Why the fuck have you got this?’

‘It was found among Greg’s possessions. It was what made me believe he was having an affair with Milena. It even has the date on it. But then you said something that made me realize you were with her on the twelfth of September.’

‘But this is mine.’

‘What do you mean, yours?’

‘She sent it to me.’

‘She can’t have done.’

‘You think I wouldn’t remember?’

‘But it’s to “Darling G”.’

He examined it for a few seconds. ‘No. That’s just a continuation of the J – you can even see the join if you look closely.’

‘How come it was in Greg’s stuff,’ I asked weakly, ‘if she sent it to you?’

‘I sent it back. I sent everything that had ever belonged to her back when she finished it – marched round to her house and dumped it in her lap.’

‘So it was in her possession, not yours.’

‘I thought she’d just burn it or something.’

I rubbed my face, trying to concentrate. ‘How did it get from her house to here?’

Johnny shrugged. ‘I don’t know and I don’t care.’

‘Maybe it was Frances all the time,’ I said drearily.

‘What the fuck are you on about now?’

‘Frances was having an affair too,’ I said. ‘I thought maybe –’

‘I don’t want to hear what you thought about Frances,’ he said angrily. ‘She’s dead. Killed by some maniac. Let her alone, do you hear me? You’ve done enough. She was a good woman. Now leave her in peace.’

‘Are you going to call the police?’ I said.

‘I think that’s for you to do, don’t you?’ he said. ‘At the moment they’re curious. Soon they’ll be suspicious. Don’t leave it too long. Or I’ll make up your mind for you.’

As soon as he was gone, I rang Gwen. I didn’t even say hello. ‘Have the police been in touch with you?’ I asked.

‘Ellie? Yes, some policeman rang me. How on earth did you know?’

‘I need to talk to you.’

Chapter Twenty-five

‘You’re kidding me.’ Gwen was staring at me across the kitchen table. She’d been running her fingers through her hair as I talked so now it stood up in small blonde tufts. She looked bewildered and accusing all at once. Her eyes were owlishly round.

‘No, I’m not.’

‘I think I’d better have that drink, after all.’

‘Red or white?’

‘Whisky?’

‘Whisky it is.’

‘So all this time…’

‘Yes.’

‘And you said you were –’

‘You. Yes.’ I poured her a large whisky, neat and ice-less. She took a deep gulp; her eyes watered. I poured another for myself and let it burn a trail down my throat.

‘And you got away with it?’

‘Yes. Until now.’

‘And now, this woman, Frances…’

‘Has been murdered.’

‘Fuck.’

‘Yes.’

‘Fuck fuck fuck.’

‘Is that all you’ve got to say?’

‘I don’t know. What should I be saying?’

‘You could scream at me. Don’t you feel angry?’

‘Angry?’ She considered, swilling her whisky in the glass, then taking another vast swallow so that I could see her throat jumping. The drink was nearly gone already.

‘Because I pretended to be you, because I lied to you about what I was up to, because I didn’t confide in you, because I’ve been so stupid, because –’

‘OK, OK, I get it. Here, give me another of these.’ She held out her glass. ‘Angry’s not the right word, Ellie. I can’t get my head round it. You’ve been using my name, infiltrating this poor woman’s business, breaking into computers, like some sort of spy, to find out – what?’

‘Something. Anything. I thought I’d go mad otherwise. And, in fact, I did find out something. I found out that Frances’s husband was having an affair with Milena, and that there was another man who was with her the night I’d thought she was with Greg. And then I found out that the menu card with the love note on – it was a forgery.’

‘What?’

‘It wasn’t to Greg at all.’

‘This is all too much to take in. You say this woman – Frances – was murdered.’

I nodded, trying not to let the image of Frances’s open, staring eyes flood through me again. ‘She was.’

‘And are you assuming that this has anything to do with Greg?’

‘I’ve no idea. It must have something to do with Milena. Though she was having an affair too – that’s probably irrelevant. I can’t think straight. Everywhere I look I see these betrayals.’

‘Are you in danger?’

‘Me?’

‘Or me?’ said Gwen.

‘No, I don’t think so, but I’m going to the police. I’ll clear up the confusion.’

‘Who else knows?’

I could feel the flush rising up my neck and covering my face. ‘There’s this guy. He’s called Johnny.’

‘Who is?’

‘Kind of a chef.’

‘And?’

‘He was Milena’s lover – one of many.’

‘How did he find out you weren’t me?’

‘He tracked me down here after he’d heard about Frances. I probably should say that I missed something out. It’s not particularly relevant, but we had a kind of thing. I slept with him. Twice.’

‘Oh.’

‘What does that mean – oh?’

‘All these secrets.’

I sloshed more whisky into her glass and my own. ‘It’s a great relief that you know,’ I said, after a pause.

Gwen opened her mouth to speak, but at that moment there was a loud knocking at the door. My head was swimming as I made my way down the hall and opened it.

Joe stood there, wrapped in his thick coat, a huge grin on his face, which was rosy with the cold.

‘I’ve brought you a rowing-machine,’ he said. ‘I could hardly get it into the car.’

‘Why?’

‘I thought it would be good for you, keep you fit through these winter months. And I didn’t actually go out and buy it, a client gave it to me.’

I didn’t want a rowing-machine. And after our last encounter I didn’t much want to see Joe.

‘And I wanted to say sorry for – you know – what happened. Aren’t you going to invite me in?’

‘Gwen’s here.’

He stepped past me and walked towards the kitchen, calling greetings to Gwen.

‘Hi there, Joe,’ she said.

‘You’ve been drinking,’ he said cheerfully.

‘So would you have been in my position.’

‘What position is that?’ He took off his coat and slung it over the back of a chair.

Gwen might not have been angry, but Joe was. He was furious, shocked and hurt. His blue eyes blazed and his lips turned white. He banged his glass down on the table so that the whisky splashed everywhere and told me I’d been very, very stupid and why the fuck hadn’t I told him what I was doing? Didn’t I understand that he and Alison wanted to look after me? Greg had been like a son to him and I was like a daughter. ‘What the fuck were you up to?’ he said. ‘What the fuck were you playing at?’

‘I don’t know. But I don’t have to explain it to you.’

‘You’re upset that your husband dies so what do you do? Weep and mourn? No. Get your life together? No. Talk things through with friends? No. See a counsellor? No.’

‘I have actually seen a –’

‘You pretend to be your own best friend and dabble in half-baked conspiracy theories – oh, Jesus. It defies belief. And where did it get you? Greg’s still dead. He still died in the car with a woman who liked having affairs with married men. Have you unearthed some deep plot?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘And now somebody’s died. What are you doing about that?’ He put his head into his hands, breathing deeply.

‘I don’t need help. I’m going to the police.’

‘You haven’t been to the police yet?’

‘No.’

‘I can drive you there now.’ Gwen stood up, placing both hands flat on the table to steady herself.

‘For Christ’s sake, you can’t drive anywhere,’ said Joe. ‘Why on earth haven’t you been to the police, Ellie?’

‘I was scared and stunned. I know I should. It’s all so complicated.’

He leaned back in his chair. He seemed so shocked that the fight had gone out of him.

‘I don’t know what it all means,’ I said. ‘Greg and Milena, and then Frances.’

‘Why does it have to mean anything except an unholy mess?’

‘I’m so tired, Joe.’ Having him there being so angry and fatherly made me feel younger and more foolish. Tears came to my eyes. ‘Maybe that’s the reason I haven’t been yet – I’m so very tired of thinking about all of it.’

‘Oh, Ell.’ Joe got up and crouched beside me, taking both my hands in his. ‘Of course you’re tired. I tell you what, leave it for tonight. Go tomorrow. I’ll take you myself, if you want.’

‘Will you?’

‘Yes.’

Then the phone rang again and at first I let the answering-machine take the call, but when I heard Fergus’s voice, I ran to pick it up.

‘Fergus? Has labour started?’

‘It’s nothing like that, Ellie. I’ve just seen some news online. It’s the weirdest thing. You know that woman in the car with Greg? Well, her partner –’

‘Fergus,’ I cut him short, ‘there’s something you should know…’

Later, when I’d finished talking to a stunned and stuttering Fergus, and Joe had gone home, leaving an enormous rowing-machine in the middle of the living room, Gwen said, ‘So why didn’t you feel able to confide in me?’

She was sitting on the sofa, her legs curled up under her, floppily relaxed and moving in a slightly uncoordinated way. Daniel was coming to take her home; she could collect her car the next day, when the whisky had worn off.

I hesitated. ‘I don’t know exactly. I think I didn’t want anyone to tell me that what I was doing was wrong. I knew it was wrong, and stupid, and maybe even a bit unhinged, or a lot unhinged, but I didn’t intend to stop. I’m sorry, though.’

‘And now?’

‘Now I’ve honestly got no idea what I think about a single thing. She was nice, though.’

‘The woman who was killed?’

‘Frances, yes. She came from an entirely different world and I would never have met her in the ordinary run of things – she was rich and stylish and ironic, and had that well-bred, well-groomed English reticence. But in spite of that I liked her. She was good to me. And I don’t understand why she’s dead. And I don’t understand why someone wanted me to think Greg was having an affair with Milena. I don’t understand at all.’

Chapter Twenty-six

I wasn’t sure which police station to go to, but I knew it would be bad either way, and it was. I went to see WPC Darby because I hoped she might be sympathetic to me, knowing me as a grieving widow. When she greeted me, I noticed the wary expression people adopt when they open their door to someone trying to give them a pamphlet about a fringe religion. But she sat me down and gave me some tea. I started to explain why I was there and her expression changed from wariness to puzzlement, then from puzzlement to what looked like alarm. She hushed me and almost rushed out of the room.

She returned five minutes later and asked if I could follow her. She led me through a door and into a room that was bare, except for a table and three orange plastic chairs. She sat me down and stood awkwardly by the door. I told her she didn’t need to stay but she said it was all right. It looked as if she had been told to stay with me and also not to say anything more. So I sat and she stood and we spent ten awful minutes avoiding each other’s eyes until the door opened and a detective came in. I recognized him as Detective Inspector Carter, the one I had talked to before. He didn’t even sit down.

‘WPC Darby tells me that you found the body of Mrs Frances Shaw.’

‘That’s right,’ I said.

‘And you called it in?’

‘Yes.’

‘Anonymously.’

‘Yes.’

‘Any particular reason for that?’

‘Kind of,’ I said.

He held up his hand to stop me. ‘It’s not our patch,’ he said. ‘I need to phone the Stockwell lads. You’ll have to wait here for a bit, if that’s all right.’

He was just being polite. I don’t think I had a choice. WPC Darby brought me a newspaper and another cup of tea, and I flicked through the pages without taking anything in. It was almost an hour before two more detectives, a man and a woman, came in and sat opposite me. WPC Darby left but DI Carter stood to one side, leaning against the wall. The man introduced himself as Detective Chief Inspector Stuart Ramsay and his colleague as Detective Inspector Bosworth. She opened her bag and took out a bulky machine, which she placed on the table between us. She loaded it with two cassette tapes and switched it on. She said the date and time and identified everybody present, then sat back.

‘The reason we’re being so formal,’ said Ramsay, ‘is that you have already made admissions that lay you open to being charged with a criminal offence. And that’s just to be getting on with. So, it’s important that, before you say anything else, we make clear that you’re entitled to legal representation. If you don’t have a lawyer, we can obtain one for you.’