ON HER RETURN TO BRIGHTON, RACHEL CARRIED Susie’s clothes from the car into her flat and laid them over the back of the sofa. She extracted the Mainbocher from the pile and hung it in the doorway on a padded coat hanger, examining the clever cut and impeccable stitching.
She had several fashion reference books, including one with photographs of styles that had appeared in Vogue over the years. She looked up Mainbocher in the index, and as she’d expected, there were dozens of entries. She worked her way through, and there, in 1934, was the tunic and skirt – the exact same outfit – being worn by Wallis Simpson herself. She checked the detail of the tendrils in the flower pattern and they were identical. It came from his Eastern-inspired fall collection.
Was there any chance this could be Wallis’s dress? she wondered. It was skinny enough. She decided to email Richard and ask his opinion, because if it had belonged to Wallis, Susie would get substantially more at auction than Rachel could charge in the shop.
She booted up the computer and went into her email folder. Hi Rich, she typed, I’ve just picked up a haul including a Mainbocher from 1934: a Chinese rose-print tunic and matching skirt. My Vogue book shows Wallis Simpson wearing it. Do you know anyone at their head office who might be able to tell me if it was hers?
That night, Rachel tried to ring Alex in Paris to tell him about her day but she kept getting his voicemail. Even at eleven at night, when he must have been in his hotel room, the phone irritatingly went straight to his ‘can’t take your call’ message. She hated going to bed without having spoken to him; it was one of their rules that whenever they were apart they had a bedtime chat. If his phone had run out of charge, he should have called her on the hotel phone. She couldn’t ring him because he hadn’t mentioned where he was staying.
As soon as she woke the next morning she tried his phone again, and this time he answered, telling her he was rushing to a meeting. She could hear traffic sounds in the background and his footfall on the pavement. ‘I was back late and didn’t want to wake you,’ he said in a tone that wasn’t remotely apologetic. She considered telling him she’d found it hard to get to sleep for worrying that something had happened, but it sounded too neurotic. Instead she said, ‘Never mind, darling. Have a good day,’ before he hung up abruptly as he reached his destination.
Rachel was depressed by the call. Alex seemed to get further away with each day that passed, and she didn’t know how to pull him back when he was working such long hours. They needed relaxed, uninterrupted time together but it was hard to see when they were going to get it; next year some time, perhaps.
She tried to cheer herself up by dressing in a favourite outfit: a 1940s dress that had a print of seaweed in shades of pale grey and slate, with hot-pink tropical fish swimming through the fronds. She teamed it with a hot-pink cardigan and peep-toe shoes, ignoring the dark clouds that threatened rain later. The right outfit could usually boost her mood, and this one had special memories because she had been wearing it in Cuba the night she and Alex learned to dance salsa in a rooftop nightclub. He picked up the steps faster than her, his hand in the small of her back as they moved to the infectious rhythm of a steel band under a vast starry sky. She made a mental note that they should go dancing in Brighton some time; there were loads of salsa clubs.
Nicola popped by the shop mid morning, wearing a zip-up parka with fur-trimmed hood over jeans and a black and red T-shirt.
‘I’ve brought raisin cookies,’ she said, pulling a pack from her oversized handbag. ‘Posh ones. Are you hungry?’
‘Not for me, thanks,’ Rachel said, putting the kettle on. When Nicola removed the parka and sat down, she noticed that her T-shirt was from the Clash’s first American tour in 1979. It showed the Statue of Liberty bound in thick ropes.
‘Alex has one just like that,’ she remarked, then spotted that it was far too big for Nicola. One shoulder had slipped down her arm.
‘Yeah, this is his,’ Nicola said. ‘I borrowed it a couple of months ago and he hasn’t asked for it back yet. You won’t grass on me, will you?’
Rachel gave a little laugh. ‘Chance’d be a fine thing. I hardly see him these days, and when I do, we only seem to argue.’
She decided to confide in Nicola about the latest rows. She had known Alex since college days and might have some useful insight. With any luck she would say that Rachel was overreacting and that everything would be fine once the filming was over.
Instead, Nicola looked increasingly alarmed as she spoke, and when she finished, said: ‘Oh no! I’ve seen him like this before, but I really believed you two were different.’
Rachel’s heart gave a lurch. ‘Seen him like what?’
‘Getting absorbed in his work, then picking fights with his girlfriend and withdrawing emotionally. He seems to panic whenever a relationship gets serious.’ She helped herself to one of the cookies.
Rachel handed her a cup of tea and sat down, feeling sick. ‘I’m sure it’s partly my fault, because I’m not being supportive enough of his documentary. Everything was perfect until Paris. We hardly ever argued before then.’
Nicola chewed her cookie, brow furrowed. ‘He’ll never agree to relationship counselling, will he? That’s what he needs.’
Rachel couldn’t see it. ‘Whenever he uses therapists to provide commentaries in one of his programmes, he says they’re more screwed up than the rest of us. He thinks they only go into therapy to mask their neuroses.’
‘You have to try something. We can’t let Alex go through the rest of his life repeating his toxic pattern. He’s like the best, most attentive boyfriend ever and girls can’t believe their luck until suddenly he switches off the love and withdraws, leaving them high and dry.’ Nicola picked up her tea and blew on the surface to cool it.
‘So you’ve seen him do this before?’ Rachel knew only the sketchiest details of Alex’s love life before she came along. They’d agreed it was unhealthy to pore over the past, and she hadn’t been keen to share the lowdown on her own romantic disasters.
‘Loads of times,’ Nicola said. ‘He’s even been engaged before. Did you know that?’
Rachel shook her head, stunned. That was something she would have expected him to share, despite the embargo on other details. She reached for a cookie absent-mindedly and started to nibble it.
‘Anna was her name,’ Nicola said. ‘She was devastated when he got cold feet and called it off just weeks before the wedding.’
There was a look on Nicola’s face that Rachel couldn’t read. Was she enjoying imparting this news? Was she glad things were not entirely rosy between them? Perhaps she was jealous of their happiness at a time when her latest relationship had failed. No, Nicola wasn’t like that. She must be misreading her.
‘I knew it wasn’t going to last with Anna,’ Nicola continued, ‘because he was cheating on her. It’s never a good sign, is it?’ She stopped and peered at Rachel. ‘Are you OK? You look pale. Sorry, I shouldn’t be telling you this right now. Bad timing.’
Rachel hugged herself, stroking the arms of her cardigan. ‘I didn’t realise Alex was the unfaithful type. I’m allergic to them after my last experience.’
‘Oh God, I’m so tactless. Alex is not a compulsive cheater; it’s just when a relationship wasn’t working in the past, there might have been a slight overlap with the next one. You’ve got nothing to worry about. I’ve never seen him so smitten with anyone as he is with you. Truly.’
Nicola was backtracking frantically, trying to smooth over the damage she had caused, but Rachel was silent and withdrawn. She couldn’t wait for Nicola to leave so she could be alone.
It was an odd feeling to hear that someone she thought she knew inside out had a callous streak she could never have imagined. There had been a similar coldness when he’d interviewed Susie. Rachel was pretty confident in Alex’s love for her, but probably Anna had been confident at the time too. Would Alex be capable of withdrawing his love for no good reason? Could he already have her successor lined up?
Back at the flat that evening, Rachel booted up the home computer. She hated herself for what she was about to do, but Nicola had planted a seed of doubt that she couldn’t dispel. She opened Alex’s email account, pleased to note it wasn’t password-protected; didn’t that show he had nothing to hide? She would check anyway, just this once, then forget all about her suspicions. They were unworthy of her.
Amidst the usual junk mails, there were messages from his team about equipment and timings, many of them in a kind of shorthand that meant nothing to her: PAL 700, VHS transfer, burnt-in time code. There were several messages from someone called Pascal, but she quickly worked out that he was one of the researchers in France. Lots of male friends had emailed complaining they hadn’t seen him for ages and asking when he could manage ‘a swift half’, to which he replied that he would call them as soon as he’d proved who’d killed Diana.
And then she noticed that Nicola’s name cropped up regularly, every few days. She hesitated before opening one of her mails: Thanks for picking up the bill last night. You spoil me, it read. She checked the date and saw it was for the previous Friday, when he had come home late. She opened another mail: You are the best, it said, followed by a whole line of kisses, as if Nicola had leant on the X key and held it down with determination. She began to feel uneasy. She read three more emails from Nicola, all of which demonstrated that their Friday evening meetings were a regular occurrence and she and Alex were much closer to each other at the moment than he was to her.
Suddenly she remembered an incident at their New Year’s Eve party ten months ago. It was almost 4 a.m. and she was about to head for bed, although a crowd were still partying in the sitting room. She went to the kitchen to get a glass of water but stopped in the doorway when she saw Alex and Nicola standing still with their arms around each other. There was nothing sexual about the hug; it was two friends, both the worse for drink, more or less propping each other up. Rachel had seen them hug before and it hadn’t remotely worried her, but this hug lasted a long time. Eventually she cleared her throat dramatically and they jumped apart.
Had she been wrong not to worry about the hug? Could Alex possibly be having an affair with Nicola?