When they got in, there was no sign of Jordan but Carl had texted that he appeared to be enjoying the rehearsal.
‘What are your plans for this afternoon?’ Elizabeth asked.
‘I thought I’d pop into college. Check my pigeonhole.’
‘You think Marin will contact you there?’
‘It’s where the money turned up. It seems the logical place. D’you want to come?’
‘I’ll stay here and have a nap, if that’s okay with you. I don’t think I slept at all last night.’
‘Good idea. I need to pick up a few things but I shouldn’t be gone for more than an hour.’
They ate a sandwich lunch in the garden then Diane went off in the car and Elizabeth had the house to herself.
It was easy to forget, when 150 miles of motorway separated them, how demanding Diane could be. Melodramatic, too. Laurence was never at ease when Di was around, as if he were dreading that she might announce she wasn’t wearing knickers, or come right out and challenge his privileged upbringing. Laurence was always courteous – Old Etonians didn’t know how not to be – but, within no time at all, he found a reason to absent himself. Last year, when Carl was away on an orchestral tour and Diane had come to stay with them, Laurence had spent most of the weekend in the attic, ‘rationalising the storage system’, only coming down for meals and when it was time to drive Diane to Paddington.
She and Diane had been thrown together by the vagaries of the education system. If she had been six months younger, or if an official had drawn a different line on the map, they would never have met. And had they not been in the same form, and in the same ‘sets’ for English and Maths, they would never have become friends. Elizabeth loved having a ‘wild’ friend. Who didn’t want to be mates with the school renegade? Besides giving her kudos amongst her contemporaries it irritated her parents. They’d shared only five schoolgirl years but they had been the intense, miserable, wonderful years of puberty. After O levels, Diane had left and, inevitably, they saw less of each other. Their friendship might have petered out altogether had Paul Raines not died and Diane been in such trouble.
Of course there had been other friends along the way. Carol Wills and she had been as thick as thieves from the moment they started primary school until the day the Wills family moved to Lancaster (or was it Leicester?). At college there was Fiona McFarlane. After they graduated, Fiona had gone off to do VSO in Malawi, whilst she’d married Laurence and become a mother. For a few years they’d made the effort to keep in contact but, by unspoken mutual consent, they’d lapsed into exchanging birthday cards and Christmas catch-up letters until finally those had stopped coming too.
And there were dozens of other people whom she termed ‘friends’. Work colleagues, members of her reading group and her Pilates class, the Kaufmanns next door, Romina and James across the road, Leonie and Dag up in Camden. All of them were more than acquaintances – but were they truly friends?
Spotting a Concise Oxford Dictionary on the bookshelf, she flicked through its flimsy pages
Friend, n. One joined to another in intimacy & mutual benevolence independently of sexual or family love; person who acts for one, e.g. as second in duel.
She smiled. Diane would definitely be up for a bit of duelling action. Interesting, too, that according to this definition friendship excluded sexual love. (One in the eye for those who swore that their spouses were also their best friends.)
Catching sight of herself in a mirror, she noted her pasty face and dark-ringed eyes. If – if – she were going next door for the much-talked-of drinks, she ought to catch up on her sleep. It was tempting to find a deckchair and doze in the garden. But she never slept properly unless she was lying on a bed so, yawning, she went upstairs.
Jordan’s bedroom door was shut but, persuading herself that his window might need opening, she went in. The bed was unmade, pillows on the floor and, as she suspected, the room had a ‘fruity’ smell. Everything that had been inside his rucksack was now outside it, dispersed evenly across the floor. Order one day, chaos the next. Was he trying to wrong foot her? Was he following a handbook on guerrilla warfare? Keep the enemy guessing.
Picking her way through the debris she went to the window and opened it as wide as it would go, immediately feeling a current of air drawing through the room.
She looked across the gardens to Dafydd Jones’s house. Most of the windows were open. An array of garden furniture – deckchairs and those nasty lounger things – dotted the lawn. A tray of glasses stood on the flagstones near the back door. But there was no sign of anyone.
When they’d returned to the house last night, she’d cross-questioned Jordan and he’d told her that the girls had made contact in the afternoon, whilst she’d been out for her walk. ‘We, like, chatted through the hedge.’ ‘You didn’t mention it.’ ‘Do I have to tell you, like, everything? Then, in the night, they invited me over. Seemed stupid, waking you up to tell you I was going next door.’
She was way behind on sleep. Should things continue like this, it threatened to be a long week. But never mind. If it all became too much, she could concoct a reason for cutting short her visit. A crisis boiling up at the school. A plumbing calamity. Something wrong with the cat.
Lying on her bed, she gave in to the cocktail of fatigue and comfort, and it wasn’t long before she drifted off to sleep.
A phone invaded her dreams, jangling her into wakefulness. Gathering her thoughts, she lay waiting, expecting the machine to cut in. But the phone kept ringing and, judging by its volume, she guessed there was an extension somewhere upstairs. Thoroughly awake now, she went to find it.
The handset stood in its cradle on the table next to Diane’s bed. ‘Hello?’
Silence for a second, then a man’s voice, ‘Diane?’
‘No. She’s not here at the moment. Can I take a message?’
‘No,’ he said quickly. ‘No it’s fine thanks.’
‘Can I tell her who called?’
‘I’ll call another time. Thank you.’
The line went dead.
His voice had sounded reedy, as though he were using a mobile. Could he have been foreign? His English had been perfect but he had said so little that she couldn’t be sure one way or the other. She dialled one-four-seven-one only to be told that ‘the caller withheld their number’.
Sitting on the bed, trying to hang on to the man’s voice, and his exact words, she was conscious of being an intruder in this bedroom. She took a furtive look around. A few of Diane’s clothes were draped over the chair near the window. A pile of sheet music and another of spiral-bound sketchbooks stood on top of the chest of drawers. A towel dangled half in, half-out of the linen basket. This was Diane and Carl’s private space. They shared this king-sized bed. (At least for the time being.) Before leaving, she smoothed the duvet, eliminating the evidence of her being there.
‘Sorry I took so long,’ Diane said. ‘I bumped into a couple of my final year students and we went for a coffee. They’re trying to persuade me to go to Greece with them. It’s tempting.’
‘Are they good-looking by any chance?’
She poked her tongue out. ‘Very.’
Diane was wearing a turquoise shift nipped in at the waist by a wide belt. Her hair was fashionably messy, her limbs tanned. She wore cork-soled sandals which revealed silver rings on several of her toes. She looked about thirty, thirty-five at most, and she made Elizabeth feel like a fuddy-duddy elephant.
‘Was there anything in your pigeonhole?’
Propositions? Broken hearts? A pack of lies?
‘Lots, but nothing exciting.’
‘Oh, I almost forgot.’ Pants on fire. ‘A man phoned about an hour ago.’
‘Did he leave a name? Or a message?’
‘No. But it did cross my mind…’
Diane raised her eyebrows. ‘What? You think it was Marin?’
‘Well…’
‘God,’ she laughed, ‘maybe I should bugger off to Greece. It would be one way of sorting out my problems.’
‘Oh, and I had a call from my neighbour. She says my cat’s off colour.’ Elizabeth pulled her phone from the pocket of her shorts, as if it would corroborate her story. ‘He’s … he’s not eating properly.’
Diane raised a finger in the air. ‘That reminds me, what we shall have for supper?’
Jordan appeared at the back door. ‘Can I have a drink, please?’
‘Where’s Carl?’ Elizabeth asked, pouring him a glass of water.
He shrugged. ‘I came back on the bus.’
‘What? On your own?’
He gulped down the water, placing the empty glass on the worktop before replying, ‘I’m not totally clueless.’
‘I didn’t for a second think that you were. Does Carl know you—’
‘Yup.’
‘And how was the rehearsal?’
‘Cool.’
‘You worry too much,’ Diane said when Elizabeth told her. ‘He’s a smart kid. Carl would have made sure that he knew where to catch the bus and that he had money for his fare.’ She looked around. ‘Where is he now?’
‘Back in the tent.’
While Elizabeth washed lettuce, Diane peeled hard-boiled eggs. ‘I’ve been thinking about that phone call. Could the man have been Irish, by any chance?’
‘Not an Irishman, too?’ Elizabeth raised her hands to her ears. ‘No, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.’