Lara’s eyes widen. “Really? Not once? How can that be?”
I shrug. “I guess I didn’t want to see him at first, and then Dad got ill so I was up in Yorkshire for a bit.” It was cancer. Pancreatic cancer. I pause, remembering the phone call from Mum, the hopelessness in her voice as she forced herself to utter the dreaded C-word, followed by the mad dash to get the very next train home. I cried silently for almost the entire three-hour journey, sitting alone in a quiet seat facing a luggage rack. By the time I got to the hospital I was ash white and out of tears. “Anyway, by the time I came back his bank had sent him off to Singapore or somewhere like that.”
“Hong Kong, I think. Tom and Caro went to visit.” She takes another sip of her wine, laying down another mark of her presence with an overlapping lipstick print. “Makes it kind of hard to find closure if you’ve never actually seen him since.” She uses her hands to hang an ironic set of quotation marks around “closure” and gives the word an American twang.
“Closure,” I repeat, mimicking her twang. “Closure.” I take a long swallow from my glass, then try the word again in my own accent, rolling it around my mouth. “Closure.” I shake my head. “Nope. Word has absolutely no meaning.”
She giggles. “I think you’re too British for the concept of closure.”
“Or too northern. We don’t grin and bear it; we just bear it and don’t bother with the grin.”
“We Scandies don’t bear it at all; we just off ourselves.”
We smile at each other, enjoying the connection and the levity, and the weight in my stomach lifts a little. It will be all right, I think. When all this is over, everything will be all right again.
The feeling lasts until I climb into a cab home to find Severine already in occupation. The sight of her is like a slap in the face, or a brutal thump back down to earth: it shocks the sense back into me. All right: what an appallingly trite sentiment. It won’t be all right, at least not for everyone; how could I have temporarily forgotten I’ve long stopped believing in guaranteed happy endings? There was a time with Seb where what I felt for him, what I thought he felt for me, was like a rising tide, buoying me up over all obstacles. The inevitable crash when the tide abruptly receded was shattering, all the more so because I should have known better, because I did know better. Oxford was an education in more ways than one: I learned that like sticks with like. Bright, outspoken girls from underprivileged backgrounds might be fun to hang out with, but they don’t ultimately make the inner sanctum of the Sebs of this world. Somehow, even knowing that, even in the face of all evidence to the contrary, I allowed myself to be fooled into believing our relationship would be different, that things would be all right.
I won’t be a fool again; I won’t allow it. I need a damn lawyer.
* * *
—
“Eight o’clock tonight,” says Caro emphatically down the phone on Thursday afternoon. Julie rang her earlier in the week to confirm my attendance, but it’s clear Caro isn’t taking any chances. “I know this is, well . . . difficult for you, but I won’t accept any last-minute excuses; after all, Borderello’s is hell to get a table at.” Her tone is carefully constructed to sound like a lighthearted tease mixed with sympathy, but Caro is not that kind of girl: she doesn’t gossip and sympathize and commiserate. She pokes and prods under the cover of witty repartee.
“Of course I’ll be there,” I say calmly. “I’m looking forward to it.” For a moment I entertain the fantasy of turning up with an adoring Adonis on my arm—who? where would he come from at such late notice?—but I’ll have to settle for Lara and Tom. Perhaps the Adonis trick would be too obvious anyway.
“It’ll be great to have the old gang back together,” she says brightly. “Like old times.” Old times. The thought makes me shudder. Caro’s old times must be very different from mine. I try to strip the irony from any potential response, but she’s already forging on: “That’s all I seem to be talking about these days, what with the investigation and everything. Modan can’t seem to stop with the questions, can he? Have you seen him, too?”
“Not really. He dropped by on Monday, but I was too busy to have more than five minutes for him.”
“I made the mistake of freeing up half an hour for him. I don’t know what for, really—all he wanted to talk about was who was sleeping with who, and whether anyone was sleeping with Severine.”
“Well, I certainly wasn’t,” I say flippantly. “Girls have never been my thing. What about you?”
She gives what may be a genuine laugh. “No, me neither. I’m boringly bourgeois that way. But seriously, I suppose it changes things a bit if someone was sleeping with her.”
“How so?” I ask, making my voice as uninterested as possible. Does she really know about Seb and Severine? Is she trying to find out if I know? Does she know that I know that she knows that . . .
“Motive, I suppose—crime of passion or some such thing. God, I sound like CSI.” She laughs it off. “It’s all a bit grubby, really, having a stranger like Modan poring eagerly through all our tangled love lives.” She switches gear audibly. “Anyway, tonight. Eight o’clock. Borderello’s.”
“See you there.”
I put down the phone, her words turning over in my head: our tangled love lives. I was with Seb. Lara was with Tom. Other than Seb’s infidelity, where lies the tangle? Come to that, Caro wasn’t with anyone: why would she say “our” love lives? I start to run the payroll software that I use to manage Julie’s and Paul’s salaries, but I’m too distracted to make sense of the process. Abruptly I shut down the program and grab my phone.
“Kate, hello.” Tom sounds harried.
“Bad time?” I glance at the clock: it’s ten to three. “Oh shit, sorry, it’s almost expiry time.” Foreign exchange options usually expire at three.
“Yup. Can I call you back after?”
“Sure.”
He pauses. “You okay?”
“Yes, fine. It’s nothing. Call me back later.” My voice sounds too bright, too forced.
“Okay.”
I put down my mobile and stare at it for a moment, then I shake myself and open the payroll software again with grim determination. It’s sufficiently alien that to make any progress I have to concentrate to the exclusion of anything else; it’s curiously calming. When my mobile finally rings I’m startled.
“Kate?” It’s Tom. The real world floods back in and temporarily robs me of breath. “Kate? Can you hear me?” he asks.
“Yes, sorry. I’m here.”
“Everything okay?”
“Yes . . . actually, no. Was Seb sleeping with anyone else?”
“What?” He’s genuinely taken aback. “Where’s this coming from?”
“It’s just something Caro said. I wondered . . .” I feel a cold sweat on my torso. It’s excruciatingly embarrassing to have to ask this. It’s embarrassing to even have to wonder it. In time I will feel anger at Seb for putting me in this position, but all I feel at the moment is shame.
“Hold on a moment, this sounds like something I shouldn’t be broadcasting over the trading floor. Let me get to my office.” There’s a pause and some muffled noises, then he comes back on the line. “Fire away.”
“It’s just . . . I’m probably getting the wrong end of the stick, but I wondered if Caro was sleeping with Seb.” I add as an afterthought, “Or you, actually.” Theo I don’t consider a real possibility.
“Me sleeping with Seb?” He sounds genuinely bewildered.
I can’t help but laugh. “No, with Caro, you idiot.”
“Hand on my heart, I can promise you I have never slept with either Seb or Caro. Nor do I have any wish to.” Humor warms his deep voice.
“And Seb? Seb with Caro, to be precise.”
His pause is significant. “I don’t think so,” he says finally. There’s no trace of the humor now. “I think . . . well, Caro has always had a thing for him. You must know that.”