On top of them I shove the week’s rubbish in a plastic sack, pressing it down as though the accumulated garbage can cancel out the presence of the flowers, and then I slam the lid down and go back inside.
My hands, as I rinse them under the tap, washing away the blood from the thorns, are shaking, and I itch to call up Kate or Fatima or Thea and tell them what Luc has done, unpick his motives. Was he really trying to apologise? Or was it something else, more subtle, more damaging?
I even go as far as picking up the phone and bringing up Kate’s number – but I don’t call. She has enough to worry about, they all do, without me adding to their fears over what could be nothing but a simple apology.
One thing that bothers me is how he got my address. Kate? The school? But I am in the phone book, I realise with a sinking sensation. Isa Wilde. There are probably not that many of us in north London. It wouldn’t be that hard to track me down.
I pace the flat, thinking, thinking, and in the end I realise I have to distract myself from my thoughts or I will go mad. I go up to the bedroom and empty out Freya’s clothes drawer, sorting out the too-small Babygros and rompers from a few months ago. The task is absorbing, and as the piles grow I find I’m humming something between my teeth, a silly pop song that was on the radio at Kate’s, and my heart rate has slowed, and my hands are steady again.
I will iron the outgrown clothes and put them in the loft in plastic boxes for when – if – Freya has a baby brother or sister.
But it’s only when I come to pick up the pile and take it downstairs to where I keep the iron that I notice. They are stained, with minute pricks of blood from the roses.
I could wash them, of course. But I’m not sure if the bloodstains would come out of the fragile, snowy fabric, and anyway, I realise as I gaze at the spreading crimson spots, turning to rust, I can’t bring myself to do it. The things, the perfect, innocent little things, are ruined and soiled, and I will never feel the same way about them again.
I LIE IN bed that night, listening to Freya snuffling in her crib and Owen snoring lightly beside me, and I can’t sleep.
I’m tired. I’m always tired these days. I haven’t had a proper night’s sleep since Freya was born, but it’s more than that – I can’t seem to turn off any more. I remember the mantra of visitors when she was a newborn – sleep when the baby sleeps! And I wanted to laugh. I wanted to say, don’t you get it? I can’t ever sleep again, not completely. Not into that complete, solid unconsciousness I used to have before she came along, the state Owen seems to slip back into so easily.
Because now I have her. Freya. And she is mine and my responsibility. Anything could happen – she could choke in her sleep, the house could burn down, a fox could slink through the open bathroom window and maul her. And so I sleep with one ear cocked, ready to leap up, heart pounding, at the least sign that something is wrong.
And now, everything is wrong. And so I can’t sleep.
I keep thinking about Luc, about the tall angry man in the post office, and the boy I used to know so many years ago. And I am trying to join them up.
He was so beautiful, that’s what I keep remembering. Luc, lying out on the jetty in the starlight, his fingers trailing in the salt water and his eyes closed. And I remember lying beside him, looking at his profile in the moonlight and feeling my stomach twist with the sickness of desire.
He was my first … well, crush, I suppose, although that word doesn’t do justice to the way the feeling hit me. I had met boys before, friends of Will’s, brothers of my school friends. But I had never lain in the darkness within touching distance of a boy beautiful enough to break your heart.
I remember lying there and putting out my hand towards his shoulder – my fingertips so close that I could feel the heat from his bare, tanned skin, silver in the starlight.
Now, as I lie in bed beside my baby and the father of my child, I wonder. I imagine putting out my hand, and Luc turning in the quiet moonlight, and opening those extraordinary eyes. I imagine him putting out a hand to my cheek, and I imagine kissing him, as I did once, all those years ago. But this time he would not flinch away – he would kiss me back. And I feel it again, welling up inside me, the kind of desire you could drown yourself in.
I shut my eyes, pushing down the thought, feeling the heat in my cheeks. How can I be lying in bed beside my partner, fantasising about a boy I knew nearly two decades ago? I am not a girl any more. I am an adult, a grown-up woman with a child.
And Luc … Luc is not that boy any more. He is a man, and an angry one. And I am one of the people he is angry with.
BEFORE THE SALTEN reunion I went months, years even, without speaking to the others. But now the urge to talk to them is like a constant itch on my skin, a craving beneath the surface, like the cigarettes I suddenly want again.
Every morning I wake up and I think of the packet that is still shoved down in the bottom of my handbag, and I think too of my mobile phone with their numbers stored in it. Would it hurt so much, to meet up?
It feels like tempting fate, but as the days tick past, and the urge grows stronger, I start to justify the idea to myself. It’s not just Luc’s unwelcome gift of flowers – although talking that through with them would be a relief, it’s true. But I feel the need to make sure they are OK, bearing up under the pressure. As long as we stick to our story – that we know nothing, that we saw nothing – there is precious little evidence against us. And if we all stick to that account, they will have a hard time proving otherwise. But I am worried. Worried about Thea in particular, about her drinking. If one of us cracks, we all break. And now that Ambrose’s body has been discovered, it is surely just a matter of time before we get a call.
It plays on my mind, the idea of that call. Every time the phone goes I jump and look at the caller display before answering. The one time it was a withheld number, I let it go to answerphone, but there was no message. Probably just a cold caller, I told myself, dread churning in my stomach as I waited to see if they would ring back.
They didn’t. But I still can’t stop myself playing and replaying the call in my head. I imagine the police asking about the timings, picking apart our account. And there is one thing that I keep coming back to, imagining their questions gnawing at the issue like a rat at a knot, and I don’t have an answer.
Ambrose committed suicide because he was being sacked for gross misconduct. Because they’d found the drawings in his sketchbook or in his studio or something of that kind. That’s what we have always thought, all of us.
But if that’s the case, why were we only called into the meeting with Miss Weatherby on Saturday?