‘Are you free tonight by any chance? Could I take you out for supper?’
Cherry always found it amusing the way rich people called it ‘supper’, as if they’d never quite left boarding school. At least it gave her a little more confidence that he might be able to afford the flat he’d just so casually declared he’d have. This was actually her last appointment of the day; the others he had been interested in, they were supposed to have seen in the morning. All she needed to do was return the keys to the office and the evening was hers. She thought about her plans, a ride home on a sweaty Tube that delivered other workers to various parts of south London that diminished in salubrity as the seats emptied. She always felt left behind, the poor relation, by the time they reached Tooting Broadway, but at least, she thought with a shudder, she wasn’t quite at the end of the line. Then it was a quick stop in Sainsbury’s to get something to eat before returning to her tiny flat with no hallway. She’d hang up her precious suit with the others, the most valuable things she owned, and then no doubt would spend the evening studying property on the Internet and wondering just when she might be able to get out of there.
She looked up at her client. She liked him, liked his devil-may-care attitude. It made a change from those who turned a property down because the bathroom fittings were chrome and not brass, and were offended when the vendor wouldn’t change them before sale. Why not go out for supper with this man? she thought. It was, after all, the reason she’d worked so hard to get a job in this part of town in the first place.
THREE
Saturday 7 June
Laura sat in her usual seat, at right angles to her husband, and picked at her grilled chicken salad. All the windows in their large, airy dining room were open, but it still felt oppressive. She’d spent a languorous afternoon in the garden, Daniel sprawled out on a lounger, she under the giant umbrella, he answering her questions with eyes closed against the sun, laughing at her enthusiasm to know everything about Cherry, she taking advantage of the fact he couldn’t see her drink him in. Then just when she’d stood to go and start cooking, he’d opened his eyes and sat up, an awkward look on his face.
‘I meant to say . . .’
She turned back, a smile on her lips.
‘I sort of promised Cherry . . . It’s a concert . . . in the park . . . I’m sorry – I know I said I’d stay home with you and Dad . . .’
She quickly swallowed her disappointment and brushed off his apologies, telling him to go and enjoy himself.
Laura looked down the length of the empty, gleaming formal table that seated ten and suddenly felt an overwhelming irritation with it and the bizarre way in which she and Howard sat, clutching the end as if it were a sinking ship, following some dead ritual for so long neither of them questioned it. She turned her gaze to him. He didn’t seem bothered by the table, the heat, the fact they’d stopped talking to each other, and he was reading the day’s Telegraph, his glasses pushed up onto his forehead, while filling his mouth with salad and new potatoes. He’d been out all afternoon – she was used to that – but now he was back and she wanted to talk. She heard the chink of his knife on the china plate, the Mozart playing in the background, and her voice sounded alien.
‘Anything interesting?’
He didn’t look up. ‘Just the golf.’
The golf. She felt a twitch of hurt. That was one of the few things he still got excited about. That and Marianne, of course. She never knew which he was really doing – he’d always tell her it was the golf, every Saturday, Sunday and some weekday afternoons too, when he could get out of the office, but she knew, knew by the way he came back a little happier, a private happiness he kept within himself, which days he’d seen her. It wasn’t that it was a surprise – that had come twenty years ago, when she’d first discovered the affair. Mrs Moore had gone through his pockets before taking the suits to the dry cleaner’s and left the receipts on the kitchen worktop. She’d seen them at breakfast. Howard had already left for work, and Laura knew with absolute certainty she’d not received those flowers, nor had she been taken to lunch the previous Saturday. He denied it at first, of course, but she knew and eventually he angrily admitted it – as if it were her fault.
‘All right, it’s true. Are you happy now?’
It was the wrong choice of words: of course she wasn’t happy – her world had just imploded – and then she discovered it had been going on for two years and he was in love with her. She was married too, though, with young children and wasn’t prepared to split up the family. Laura considered leaving him – she had some money so would’ve been all right – but there was Daniel to think about. And Howard, in an emotional outburst, said he didn’t want to leave his son, who was barely out of toddlerhood, so he promised to finish it and she took him back. But things changed. Howard was miserable for weeks, working late and hardly saying a word, and the irony was that he never saw Daniel anyway. They fell into a pattern. He went to work and she brought up their son. Laura was used to loneliness. Her childhood had been an endless string of nannies, as her mother went to parties and her father was at work. She was an only child – it had been too inconvenient to have any more. Laura had longed for a relationship with her mother, but it never came, and both her parents were now long dead. Determined that Daniel wouldn’t feel as abandoned as she had, she buried the hurt over Howard’s affair by doing positive things for him: clubs, holidays, friends. Their relationship grew strong and Howard started to feel left out. He found it even harder to be at home and worked even longer hours and the resentment grew. Because he felt sidelined, he became crueller to Laura, criticizing her parenting when Daniel cried at the weekends at this man he didn’t recognize who picked him up.
Then one evening after Daniel had started university, Laura was at home while Howard went out for a drink.
‘Just someone from the club,’ he’d told her before he left.