“Oh, ha bloody ha,” said Melody, but he’d made her laugh. “Can you find out anything else? Maybe you could, you know, get a look at their files.”
He was already shaking his head. “Hack Special Branch personnel? Just exactly how daft do you think I am?”
Hazel Cavendish had spent the afternoon baking at the Islington house. Not that the kitchen was professional, by a long chalk, but it was a good deal bigger and better equipped than the kitchen in her little bungalow in Battersea. Since she’d taken the contracts to provide baked goods for a half dozen West London cafés and restaurants, she’d been picking up her seven-year-old daughter, Holly, after school and coming here several afternoons a week.
“The Islington House,” she murmured to herself as she washed up the last of the sheet pans. She thought of it in italics. Not as Tim’s house, or as their house. Although technically it was, still, their house, even though she hadn’t lived in it for two years.
It was two years almost exactly, she realized, since she had run away to Scotland. She had taken Gemma with her on that ill-fated trip, but not even Gemma had been able to save her from a disaster of her own making.
As she dried the last pan, she gazed out the window at the shadows lengthening in the garden. The garage flat was dark. Neither she nor Tim had wanted to rent it since Gemma and Toby had moved out, although she knew the money would have been helpful. Tim had managed to keep the house up without her income—had even helped her a bit—and had never complained. How, she wondered, could she ever learn to deal with her guilt when her husband seemed set on sainthood?
Tonight he’d invited them to dinner, and had gone to the shops while Hazel finished up the last of tomorrow’s tarts. Holly was playing with a friend down the street and Tim had promised to collect her on his way home.
Hazel avoided seeing their neighbors, with whom she had once been close. She found her situation hard enough to explain to herself. Separated, but still married. “Co-parents,” she supposed, a term she hated. Friends, yes. She thought they had become so, over the past two years, which was very odd. They talked about things now in a way they had never done when living as husband and wife.
And lovers . . . yes, sometimes. The thought made her color. Folding her tea towel, she took down a glass and poured herself white wine from the open bottle in the fridge. She wandered out the back door and sat on the terrace, where she and Gemma had sat and gossiped so often on warm summer evenings while the children played in the garden. She’d been avoiding Gemma lately, too, she realized. She thought Gemma must know what was going on with Tim, but she was embarrassed to admit it even to her closest friend.
She and Tim hadn’t made love here, in the bed they’d shared for years, but only in her little bungalow, when Holly was at school or sleeping over with a friend. Then, it felt like they were teenagers, stealing a few hours for illicit sex, and it was better than she ever remembered. What would it be like if they lived together again? Hazel wondered. Would ennui set in? And if it did, would she be content with it?
A shout from the gate saved her from pursuing that thought. Holly came charging in, brandishing a scraggly doll. “Mummy, Amanda gave me her Barbie,” she said when she reached the terrace. “Can I keep her, please? Amanda said she’s old and she doesn’t want her anymore.”
“What did Amanda’s mummy say?” Hazel asked.
“She said I could keep her. Amanda’s getting a new Barbie. A curvy one, but Amanda thinks that’s stupid.”
Hazel looked up at Tim, who’d come in through the house and brought his own glass of wine. She rolled her eyes at him as he sat down beside her, but said to Holly, “Darling, why does Amanda think curvy Barbie is stupid?”
“Because Barbie doesn’t look like that, Mummy,” said Holly with a seven-year-old’s disdain for the obvious.
“But—” Seeing Tim’s grin, Hazel stopped. They’d never told Holly she couldn’t have a Barbie, on the theory that the forbidden became more desirable, but they’d never bought her one, either. “Okay, sweetie,” she amended, trying not to grimace at the doll’s deformed body and feet. “Go play with her, then.” She ruffled her daughter’s dark curls.
When Holly had run happily off, Tim touched his glass to hers and said, “Good call.”
“Not tackling gender and body stereotyping during cocktail hour?”
“Ooh,” he said, laughing, “I like it when you talk like a therapist.”
Hazel smacked him on the arm. “Shut up.”
“Seriously, she’ll get tired of her, and Barbie will be so over.”
Holly’s singsong voice drifted to them from the bottom of the garden. When Hazel looked, she saw that Holly had managed to loop one of Barbie’s feet in the swing rope, and was now hanging the doll by one leg, upside down. She and Tim both started to laugh. “Sooner rather than later, I think,” Hazel managed through giggles. “You’re right, as usual.”
“I try to live with it,” he said, still teasing, but Hazel went quiet, gazing out over the garden, and thinking they should put a light on a timer in the garage flat.
She and Tim had both been family therapists, with separate practices. But when she’d come back to London after their separation, she hadn’t felt she had any business counseling others. “Physician, heal thyself,” she murmured.
Tim gave her a sharp look.
“I was thinking I could use a therapist’s advice,” she said, grasping for a logical change of subject.
She saw the sudden tension as his fingers tightened on his glass. “What about?” he asked, so levelly that she knew the effort had cost him. He was afraid she was going to drop some kind of bombshell on him.
“It’s about Melody Talbot.” She touched his arm lightly in assurance and felt him relax. “I saw her yesterday. It was very strange and it’s been nagging me since.” She told him about running into Melody in Kensington Square. “She seemed frantic, and almost . . . I don’t know . . . disassociated. The only reason she gave was she had been to her parents’ Sunday lunch and wasn’t feeling well.”
“That sounds reasonable. Especially if her family is difficult.”
“But it wasn’t reasonable,” Hazel insisted. “You know how it is when something is really wrong—you can feel it.”
Tim was silent for a moment, watching Holly, then he said, “Melody had a bad time with that fire in St. Pancras, didn’t she? She could be dealing with some degree of posttraumatic stress.”
Hazel nodded. “That’s what I was thinking. But I wondered—do you think I should say something to Gemma? As a friend?”
“Melody’s friend, or Gemma’s friend?” Tim asked, frowning. “You may not be practicing, but you’re still a therapist, and that feels a bit like tale-telling to me.”
“Damn.” Hazel leaned back and sipped at her wine. “I was afraid you were going to say that.”
“I think that you should have more faith in your own judgment. You’ll think of something.”
Hazel considered this. “The first thing is to get her to talk to me. I’ll ask her to lunch.”