Meanwhile, Lily waited by the open doors of the West End theatre, clutching two programmes, her eyes scanning the street, filtering the crowds drifting in as she waited for her friend. It was freezing, raining, blustery, a generally vile March evening. She had come by taxi from the flat she shared with her husband, Freddy, in Sussex Square, and she wasn’t dressed warmly enough, wanting to show off the gorgeous richly coloured wool jacket Freddy had brought back from Italy a month before. She longed to get inside to the stuffy warmth of the theatre. But Prem was always late. The warning bell hadn’t gone yet, but it soon would – she wondered if she should go in now and leave her friend’s ticket at the box office.
Lily loved the theatre, loved the excitement of a live performance, the sense of anticipation as the lights went down, the absorption in another world. But she wasn’t in the mood tonight. She’d have much preferred to have a large glass of wine somewhere with Prem and spill out her worries. But the play lasted nearly three hours and it would be too late afterwards. Her friend worked long days at the shop she owned in Marylebone, selling ergonomic chairs and desks, and was always exhausted.
‘Lil!’ Prem was by her side, breathless, her beautiful face alive with amusement. ‘I’ve been shouting at you.’ She gave Lily a hug. ‘Always away with the fairies, you.’
Lily laughed, handing Prem a programme as she dug the tickets from her Chloé bag – another gift from her husband. They made their way into the bowels of the building, almost the last to do so, the bell ringing insistently now, to the house seats Freddy had been given by a client currently working at his studio. The client, Asif somebody, happened to be the star of the play. Their seats were in the middle of the row, the rest of the audience already settled and tutting irritably as Lily and Prem squeezed past the knees and feet, coats, bags and briefcases that obstructed their progress between the cramped old rows, muttering ‘Sorry’ and ‘Thank you’ as they went. But Prem was always forgiven: even at fifty-two her dark-eyed, natural beauty and the dramatic sweep of glossy hair down her back turned heads wherever she went. She didn’t seem to notice the attention, however, which always endeared her to Lily, living as she now did in Freddy’s self-conscious, privileged world where image counted for so much.
Lily did not consider herself beautiful – although Freddy often insisted she was. Her sister, Helen, had been the one with the looks. But with her floppy brown hair shining auburn in sunlight, her large hazel eyes, strong nose and slim figure, Lily possessed a diffident grace. And coupled with her restrained bohemian style and wide, forthright smile, she was a woman who caught the eye in any gathering. It sometimes brought her up short to realize she was now part of Freddy’s glamorous milieu, no longer the life-or-death theatre of brain surgery – her first husband’s profession. In fact, she’d never felt entirely part of either, her own world more solitary and internal, her comfort zone the smooth, blank paper upon which she loved to draw.
‘Go back and say hi to Asif,’ Freddy had instructed earlier. ‘I told him you’d be in tonight.’
‘Do I have to? I barely know him,’ Lily had protested. She always felt awkward hanging around in those small, stuffy West End dressing rooms, the actor half clothed, high from the performance, eyes dark with mascara, skin thick with greasepaint, searching her face to see whether she’d really liked it or was lying through her teeth to protect his or her ego. It was another world backstage, a private club from which ordinary mortals like herself were excluded, always tense with an unsettling mix of insecurity, competition and hubris. If Freddy were there, it would be fine. He always knew what to say, how to make everyone feel good, but Lily just felt stupid and out of place.
Freddy had kissed her, running his finger down her nose, smiling the loving smile that never failed to melt her heart. ‘Don’t be such a wimp, Lily. He’ll think you hated it if you don’t go back. All you need do is pop in for ten seconds, say how simply marvellous it all was, gush a bit. How hard can that be?’
She nodded. ‘I’ll see,’ she said, knowing she wouldn’t. She would make up some excuse about Prem needing to rush off. Freddy could text Asif tomorrow, gush all he liked. And anyway, he was in such a strange mood at the moment. The thought made her stomach twist and she pushed it away, opening the programme and pretending to be interested in what she was about to see.
‘Where’s Freddy tonight?’ Prem asked, leaning towards Lily as the lights in the auditorium faded.
‘Umm . . . work, the usual,’ she replied. But something in her tone must have alerted her sensitive friend.
‘You okay?’ she whispered, as Asif Baka wandered barefoot onto the stage in tracksuit bottoms and a frayed white T-shirt, which showed off his suitably toned biceps, reading a book upside down. Not a promising start.
In Lily’s opinion the play was dreadful – overacted and pretentious. Prem agreed. Lily noticed she had nodded off for a while in the first act and envied her ability to switch off like that.
‘Do you have to stay?’ Prem asked as they hovered uncertainly in the corridor by the entrance to the bar, standing back from the press of people eager for a half-time drink.
‘Freddy would say I should. But I can always tell him you weren’t feeling well or something. And if Asif is pissed off, then I’m sure he’ll get over it. It’s not as if we’re all best mates. He’s just a client of Freddy’s.’
‘Clients are important.’ Prem’s business mind kicked in. ‘I’ll do the second half if you want me to.’
Lily laughed. ‘No, let’s get out of here. It’s ridiculous sitting through something neither of us is enjoying just so we can go backstage and be fake to someone who probably won’t even register who we are.’
‘Put like that . . .’ Prem grinned and took her friend’s arm.
*
‘So what are you saying?’ Prem asked. They were sitting in the basement of a restaurant/bar just yards from the St Martin’s Lane theatre, in William IV Street. Set out on the rough wooden table between them were a bottle of Bordeaux, olives, Italian salami, chilli-garlic prawns, strips of toasted sourdough and a small terracotta bowl of cervelle de canut – a soft creamy cheese dip with shallots and chives. ‘You think Freddy’s having a thing with someone?’
Lily felt close to tears at the idea, although it was what she’d been silently thinking for weeks. ‘Well, what else can it be? He’s tense, distracted all the time, constantly checking his phone – not that he doesn’t always – coming in at God knows what time . . .’
‘Freddy’s never kept normal hours, though. Don’t musicians record all night sometimes?’
Lily nodded. ‘They do, but Freddy doesn’t have to be there all the time – he has people to do that. And he never used to, not night after night. I don’t know . . .’ She gazed at her friend. ‘It’s different. I can’t explain how, but he’s acting strangely, even for Freddy.’
Prem reached across the table and laid her hand over Lily’s. ‘God, you’re freezing.’ She patted her and withdrew. ‘Have you asked him about it?’
‘Yes. He just says he’s really busy, he’s sorry, things will improve shortly. He says to stop worrying.’ She gave a short laugh. ‘Which is exactly what he’d say if he was having an affair, right?’
Prem sighed, and raised her eyebrows slightly. ‘I suppose . . . It’s just . . . Freddy adores you, Lily, you know he does. I realize he’s gorgeous and out there and every woman on the planet envies you for being married to him. But honestly, I’ve never taken him for a flirt. Whenever I see him, he just seems totally into you. I mean, you’ve only been married . . . What is it? Three years? Surely it takes longer than that to stray.’
Lily didn’t reply, just picked with her nail at a warm drop of candle wax solidifying on the table. She noticed that some saffron ink from a drawing she was doing of a girl’s face she’d studied on the Tube a few weeks ago had stained the inside of her second finger and rubbed at it absentmindedly with her thumb.
‘Don’t you think?’ Prem was asking.
‘That’s what I tell myself. But I just know something’s up, and what else could it be?’
There was silence between the two women. Then Prem, her voice tentative, asked, ‘Are you still having sex?’
After a very long pause, Lily answered, ‘No.’
She saw her friend’s mouth twist. ‘How long?’
‘Weeks.’
‘And this isn’t usual?’
Lily shook her head. For her and Freddy, not usual at all. She and Prem did not normally talk about their sex lives. She had no idea if Prem and her husband, Anthony, had a good sex life, a bad one or a non-existent one. She had never asked and didn’t want to know. She’d had other friends who went into lurid detail – one in particular who’d talked at length once about a strap-on penis, which had left seriously unwanted images in Lily’s head that were hard to dispel when next she met the couple over spaghetti bolognese. So it struck home that Prem was even asking.
‘You think that proves it?’ Lily asked, her stomach turning on the red wine she had being gulping down too fast.
‘It probably indicates he’s under some sort of stress. But maybe it’s just business. Maybe the studio isn’t doing so well, or a client has kicked off about something. It could be a host of things to do with work or money that he doesn’t want to worry you about.’
Nothing Prem had said comforted Lily. Freddy was a great businessman. He’d had his recording studio for years now and it was highly respected in the industry. It had made him rich. If there were problems he’d share them with her as he always did, giving her the lowdown on which artist was in and what they were recording and whether he thought the work was any good. He had his hand in everything.
When Lily didn’t reply, Prem went on, ‘I absolutely refuse to believe Freddy is having an affair. I just can’t see it.’ She eyed her friend for a long moment. ‘Go home and ask him. Don’t let him wriggle off the hook this time, Lil. Keep on at him till you have a proper answer. Otherwise you’ll drive yourself mad, probably over something quite trivial that’s nothing at all to do with you.’
Lily sighed, trying her best to accept what Prem had said. She was so grounded, so practical, and mostly right. She was an amazing friend. Lily thought back ten years. News of her first husband Garret’s death – so sudden, so shocking, so completely unbelievable – making Lily’s head spin so hard she could hardly breathe. Prem hadn’t made a fuss, just scooped up Lily’s then teenaged twins, Dillon and Sara, and taken them back to her house. Sara was friends with Prem’s only daughter, Aisha, at the Fulham secondary school they both attended. She’d fed them, comforted them, brought wine and groceries round to Lily’s house, while Anthony temporarily palmed off his divorce clients to deal with the bureaucratic nightmare involved in bringing Garret’s body back from Switzerland. She’d been more of a sister to Lily than her actual sister, Helen.
‘You trust Freddy, don’t you?’ Lily asked, her heart beating uncomfortably fast when Prem didn’t reply at once.
‘I don’t know him that well but, yes . . . yes, I trust him.’
‘Like you trusted Garret?’
Prem hesitated again, frowning. ‘I knew Garret from when he trained with Raj at Guy’s – twenty years at least. And he was . . . he was one of those people you’d trust with your life, literally.’ She laughed. ‘That’s the point of a brain surgeon, I suppose.’ Raj was Prem’s older brother. He and his partner, Hal, lived in Minnesota, where Raj worked at the Mayo Clinic, doing research on genetic sequencing.
Lily gave a rueful smile. ‘And you don’t feel like that about Freddy?’ She shrugged. ‘No reason why you should.’
‘As I said,’ Prem replied, ‘I’ve only known him for such a short time. And we don’t see him much – he’s always working.’
*
Lily got home late – the two women had sat for hours over the wine and then some fresh mint tea. She was fired up by Prem’s insistence she get the truth from her husband. He wouldn’t be asleep – Freddy seldom went to bed before midnight, often considerably later. She realized she was nervous, almost frightened, as she let herself into their sixth-floor penthouse in the smart block set back from Bayswater Road, minutes from Lancaster Gate. Did she really want to know what was making him so edgy, so distant? Shouldn’t she just do as he’d suggested and stop worrying, let it pass, whatever it was?
She pictured him lounging on the sofa in the soft light of their large, luxurious sitting room, probably in his habitual jeans and untucked shirt, bare feet propped on the low oak coffee table, his handsome face, framed by thick, dark wavy hair, looking up at her with its perfect light-olive complexion and those large brown eyes, which could switch from being charmingly social, to tender and so loving, to something much darker and unfathomable, all within seconds. ‘Mercurial’: that was the word someone had once used to describe Freddy March.
But the flat was dark and silent. Lily slipped her heels off – they were stupidly high and her feet had been aching almost since she’d put them on – and left them in the hall, padding over the polished floorboards in her stockinged feet to the bedroom at the end of the corridor. Maybe he was asleep after all. The door was open, though, just as she had left it hours before, the smooth, expensive white bed linen untouched, except for a sea-green cardigan she had failed to put away earlier. She glanced at the bedside clock: 1:05 a.m. Where is he? She reached for her phone to check if he had called, and rang his mobile when it was clear that he hadn’t. It went straight to voicemail: ‘Freddy March’s phone. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you.’ His voice was warm and strong, confident. She loved him so much.
Where are you? she texted him. I’m not asleep. Pls call when you get this. xxx
Then she wandered back to the sitting room and went to stand by the glass doors onto the balcony, staring across the roofs at the city, the lights still dotted randomly over the floors in the hotel nearby, the dark patch of Hyde Park behind. She heard a police siren in the distance, over the constant background growl of traffic which never stopped and which she barely noticed after so many years in London. Her head was thick with the tension she knew she’d been hanging onto for weeks now, and also, no doubt, from too much red wine. There was no point in waiting up, she decided. If Freddy were involved in an all-night session at the studio, he’d have his phone turned off anyway. Better to talk to him in the morning. If she confronted him when she was so tired, she’d probably accuse him of all sorts of ridiculous stuff and they’d have a row.