Cherry stood there for a moment, aware of what she’d done but unable or unwilling to make amends. She felt like she was suffocating and needed to get out of the room. ‘I’m just going to get changed.’
After a split second, Daniel scrambled after her and followed her to the bedroom.
‘Is everything OK?’
Cherry tugged off her tights and threw them on the floor. She lay down on the bed. ‘Fine.’
‘Your mum OK?’
‘Yes, she’s good.’
She was obviously blocking him. He didn’t know how to bring up what the removal man had said, and instinctively knew it wouldn’t go down well. ‘It doesn’t look like everything’s OK,’ he said gently.
‘Honestly, everything’s fine. It’s just this headache.’
‘I’ll tell Will I can’t go out. Make something up . . .’
‘No, you go.’ She rolled over, smiled at him. ‘I’m sorry – it’s just been a long day, that’s all. But you go out,’ she added hurriedly. ‘I think I might just try and get an early night.’ And with a chaste kiss on the lips, she waved him out. He had run out of ways to cajole her and went to the Japanese with Will, telling him something about Cherry having a migraine. It had been a bit of a half-hearted affair and he got the feeling Will regretted asking him to come out. Daniel had brushed off his query of whether everything was ‘all right back there’ and considered calling Cherry but thought she might be asleep. When he got back, around ten thirty, she was.
Just like now. He looked at her beautiful face once again, the eyelashes dark against her cheek, and decided a kiss might wake her. He grabbed Rufus, who’d snuck in behind him, as along with chewing any shoe that wasn’t at least a metre off the ground, he had a tendency to jump on the bed and lick your face. Then he crept out of the room and went to work.
Cherry woke at eighty thirty with a nagging distraction, like a fly that buzzed around the room before going quiet, then just when you’d forgotten about it, started up again. Then it came back to her. She’d behaved stupidly the night before and she cringed as she thought of how she’d made up that lame excuse to Daniel’s friend. What was his name? Will. She’d met him a couple of times before, many months ago. He was OK, but a bit pleased with himself, a trait that irritated her. It was no excuse, though, and she should have been charming; she should have gone out to dinner with them both. It had got awkward with Daniel and she’d tried to make amends, but all she could think about at the time was her mother, what had happened.
She suddenly curled up in a tight ball of pain and guilt. She’d hit her mum. It made her feel sick with guilt, but, she thought fiercely, Wendy was wrong about why she was with Daniel. She loved him. It was just good luck that he was wealthy. Good luck that she’d had a hand in, yes, but wasn’t there a famous saying that you make your own luck? Cherry cringed as she went over the events in her mind again. The thing she’d tried to hide for so long, the horrible, shameful fact that she was ashamed of her own mother, had come out, and all because Laura had been going round saying stuff, hurtful stuff to her. The anger rose up again. God, how she hated her.
There was one point last night when she’d almost broken. She’d wanted to tell Daniel everything – how she’d manipulated him by pretending she didn’t know he was alive, what she’d said and done to Laura to teach her a lesson and how Laura wouldn’t just leave her alone – but knew that she couldn’t. Not ever. She’d sent him off to some restaurant and lain in bed wondering if he’d call before she fell asleep. At some point, he’d come back and got into bed without waking her and done the same in reverse this morning.
Restless, she jumped out of bed. Those old married couples in the news who always said never to go to sleep without resolving an argument were right. She shouldn’t have left it to fester while they slept. She had to make amends and decided to surprise him with a nice meal when he came home. A cliché, she knew, but it would work. She wandered into the kitchen and pulled down some of the cookery books she’d bought from the local bookshop for their kitchen, flicking through the pages. Rufus barked at her and she picked him up and let him help choose. They settled on a tagine. Exotic enough to have made an effort but actually pretty easy, judging by the instructions.
That decided, she started making coffee, and the fly buzzed inside her head again. The Laura fly. It made her skittish and she hated the feeling. If only she could swat it, crush it, wipe its entrails on a piece of kitchen roll and chuck it away. Maybe someone had done it for her. Half amused with the idea, she turned on the TV, watching the breakfast news to hear if there’d been an accident. A woman who’d put a foot in the road a second too soon and was pancaked, or who’d been knocked off the platform on the Underground. It wasn’t likely. Laura generally didn’t take the Tube. Something had to happen to her. It was so effortless really, just a tiny thing could upset the equilibrium. Intrigued by the simplicity, she decided to google it, ‘how to cause an accidental death’. She opened up the laptop and had started to type into the search engine when her fingers froze over the keyboard. Jeez, that was close. Cherry knew that it was impossible to completely eradicate a browsing history. Thank God she’d only got to ‘cause’. It wasn’t like she was actually planning on doing anything. But just in case. She closed down the computer and decided to have a little fun with her imagination instead. Lightning . . . Bit difficult to control. Being stung by a bee . . . Maybe Laura was the type to suffer from an anaphylactic reaction. Could you train bees somehow? Maybe you could put something on the skin that would attract them. There was still a fairly high failure rate in this scheme, though: it would depend on the person being irritated enough to bat them away and on the bee actually releasing its sting. Hmm . . . what about drowning? It would require a strong current – and no observers. Poisoning? Oh, why couldn’t Laura have been different? Why was she so possessive, so insistent that she, Cherry, wasn’t good enough for her beloved son?
By lunchtime, she was feeling a lot better. Of course she wasn’t intending to go round to Laura’s house and put bleach in her tea, but it had been good therapy to speculate.
After lunch, she went shopping for the ingredients for her make-up dinner and then started cooking. The tagine filled the flat with the scent of cinnamon, bay and cumin, and the meringue roulade stood regally on the worktop. At half past six, she set the table, and twenty minutes later, Daniel came home. She waited for him to come into the kitchen. Straight away she saw that she’d done the right thing: the sight of the table with its carefully laid-out wine glasses and cutlery raised a smile and defused the coolness between them.
‘What’s this?’ he said.
‘My way of saying sorry. For being a miserable old bag yesterday.’
‘You were a bit.’
‘Hey!’