‘Well, that was fucking grim,’ Nick said. ‘I tell you what, when my time comes, I want you all to have a bloody big party. Hire a DJ, get rat-arsed and let your hair down.’
‘What makes you think I’ll be there to organize it?’ I said.
‘Oh, you’ll outlive me for sure,’ Nick said. ‘What with my lousy genes and my misspent youth, I’ll be lucky to see sixty-five. You did brilliantly, by the way,’ he added, turning my face towards him and bestowing a kiss on my forehead.
‘It was a funeral, not a school play,’ I said, taking off my coat and tossing it over the back of the sofa.
‘She put a brave face on it, didn’t she? The Old Dear.’
‘I’m not sure she needed to…’
Nick gave me a funny look.
‘What, you think she’s glad…?’
He looked faintly shocked and I thought, were you there, that night? When she had to be manhandled back through her own front door? When she flinched from her husband’s touch as if he were her jailor? Did that look like a happy marriage to you?
‘Well, I think there might have been an element of…’ remembering that Gordon was still warm in the ground, I deployed all the tact I could muster, ‘relief on her part.’
‘Christ,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Bleak.’
I looked at him then and it struck me how unobservant he had always been about other people and their relationships – bit-players, as they were, in the drama of his life.
‘Well,’ I said with a shrug, ‘relationships are tough, aren’t they? Christ, you of all people should know that…’
He looked bewildered, as though the fact he had one failed marriage and a string of infidelities under his belt had enlightened him not one whit.
I watched him scoop my coat fastidiously off the back of the sofa and hang it on the hook next to his. He undid the top button of his shirt, loosened his tie, ran his fingers through his hair – just as he used to do every night when he got home from work, oblivious to the aphrodisiac effect it had on me. Used to have.
He saw me watching him and tilted his head on one side indulgently.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘wake up call for me. Our marriage is my top priority now.’
‘Right, well,’ I said briskly, ‘my top priority’s a cup of tea. I’m spitting feathers here.’
‘I’ll get it…’ he said. ‘You take the weight off your—’
‘Nick!’ I snapped. ‘I think I can make a cup of tea.’
I marched into the kitchen, filled the kettle noisily and put it on the stove, then scooped the used teabags out of the pot and rinsed it out under the mixer tap, the faintly rust-tinged water reminding me, with a shudder, of the trace of fox blood I had washed away that first night. Had it really only been six months ago?
I glanced over my shoulder. Nick was leaning against the doorjamb, regarding me thoughtfully; hands in his pockets.
‘I’ve got a confession to make,’ he said.
‘Oh?’
My first thought was Imogen. He’d slept with her. I waited for the trapdoor to open beneath me but I felt… nothing. No, not nothing… I felt a little lift, a sense of possibility, a chink of light.
‘So… when you were in hospital,’ he continued, ‘and I was sitting around looking at you, at your lovely face and realizing how lucky I am to have you and what a fucking prick I’ve been…’
‘Yes…’ I said warily. I would need to make this look good.
‘Well, your phone kept going off…’
I frowned. It was only then it dawned on me that he was confessing some other misdemeanour altogether. I thought of the buzzing I had heard coming from my holdall on the return journey from the hospital, the three missed calls I had not yet got round to checking.
‘And…?’ I said.
‘… And, well, I suppose I thought, if someone’s this keen to get hold of you, I’d maybe better… have a listen…’
‘Right.’
‘… Which I know is an invasion of your privacy and not my place, yadda yadda, but I figured, under the circumstances… Anyway, it was this gallery in Mayfair…’
As soon as he said it, it was as though I had always known it. Those low atonal buzzes coming from my holdall on the back seat had been my future calling me.
He gave me his jokey hangdog look and I realized that it was impossible for him to conceive of a predicament which he couldn’t either charm his way out of, or somehow turn to his own advantage.
‘You’re not mad at me, are you?’
I kept my voice matter-of-fact. ‘What did they say?’
‘Well, it was a bit hard to follow, but essentially this guy, Tom Hayden-something or other knew your work from before and he’d bumped into someone from round here at a private view, and whoever it was, was bigging up your new project. My money’s on Luca…’
‘It won’t be Luca,’ I said with a bitter laugh.
‘Well, whoever it was, this geezer – super posh, terribly RP, wants to set up a meeting with your people…’ he sketched inverted commas humorously in the air, ‘with a view to maybe giving you a show.’
‘Ha,’ I said, ‘wait till he finds out I don’t have any people.’
‘Ah…’ said Nick looking at me significantly, ‘but you do!’
I smiled at him, but my heart was sinking.
‘It’s a no-brainer!’ Nick said. ‘Your work’s in demand, I’m stepping back from mine. You need time and space to get on with your new project, I need a little enterprise to keep me out of trouble…’
He came up to me then and looped his arms around my waist, pushing his cheek insistently against mine, as certain as ever of his power to endear, to prevail.
‘Look at us!’ he said, indicating our shadowy twins, reflected in the dusk-darkened windows behind the sink. ‘We’ve got it all now. You’ve got your studio and your talent and with a bit of a leg up from Tom Doo-Dah Whatsit, a lucrative future ahead of you. We’ve got this place. We’ve got a community. But more than anything else,’ he leaned his head against mine so that our two reflections became one, ‘we’ve got each other.’
In the dusk-darkened glass, my smile could almost have been mistaken for the real thing.
We took the tea up to bed and sipped it, side by side, like two old fogeys and then Nick snuggled down, his palms clasped tightly around my upper arm, his limpet lips only relaxing away from my flesh as sleep took hold. I sat propped against the pillows in our exquisite little bedroom, with its rustic charm and its imaginative storage solutions, and watched the achingly tasteful linen blind turn slowly from grey, to charcoal, to black.
When I woke the blind was grey again and just discernible against the darker recess of the window frame. I hadn’t set an alarm. I hadn’t needed to. I lifted the duvet up as gingerly as if it were rigged with explosives, but Nick didn’t stir, just lay spread-eagled on his back, his chest rising and falling in the deep untroubled sleep of one who has made his accommodation with the world. I took my phone off the bedside table, gathered yesterday’s clothes off the chair in the corner of the room and slipped outside to put them on. Tiptoeing downstairs, I instinctively avoided the one creaky stair and, moving through the living room like a ghost, collected my handbag from beside the sofa and my car keys from the window ledge.
I pulled the door of the Renault shut as quietly as I could, put on my seatbelt and let out the hand brake, grateful for the slight decline on the lane that meant I didn’t have to start the ignition right outside the cottage. Coasting down the hill, I let the car drift to a standstill by itself and was about to start the engine when I was struck by the silence and stillness in the little hollow. I sat for a moment, taking in the scene for the last time. The hedgerow, thick with Old Man’s Beard, seemed to glow in the dawn light beneath it clumps of nettles rose like spires. I started in shock as two bright animal eyes locked on mine through the mist. I shuddered and looked away, remembering the sickening thud as I had swung round this same bend heading into the hamlet all those months ago. Was this a haunting? Some fox ancestor, come back to jinx my departure as its forebear had jinxed my arrival? I looked again, half expecting the apparition to have gone, but it was still there, its pupils beady and unblinking. And then the creature sprang out onto the road and it was no fox but a young doe, body all angles, tail erect, torso steaming in the chill dawn. She stood there for a second, regarding me, head cocked and I sat mesmerized. Holding my breath, I turned the key in the ignition, but at the first stutter of the engine, she skittered off up the lane. I followed her for a few yards, keeping my distance. She glanced back once, as if in valediction, and then with a flick of her hind legs veered off up the bank and was gone.
The sun was up by the time I reached the junction. I held the car on the hand brake and took one last look down the valley. I had never felt so calm and resolute, so unburdened by doubt. I let the brake out and the engine roared as I pulled out into the empty road and headed for London.