By the time I opened the door he had taken several steps back and was halfway down the path, legs apart, looking at the upstairs windows. My house had piqued his interest, if not his wife’s. I pulled the door to behind me, in case he had any intention of peering in.
‘Yuh,’ he called, as if we were in the middle of a conversation. ‘Need to talk about a few things.’
‘And those things would be?’
‘Let’s start with the trees.’
His T-shirt had come loose at the side, and he made a big play of leaning sideways to tuck it in, at the same time making a noisy inhalation – a gesture that managed to simultaneously convey two things: a general superiority and a more specific air of exasperation.
I asked him what trees, and he said the trees along my back fence – ‘The apple trees – are they? – and the holly; and ivy, it’s a weed you know. I don’t want it all spreading into mine. All far too overgrown, far too overgrown.’
When I gazed at him, he raised his hand in a fist to his head and tapped it up and down a few times, his elbow pointed out at an angle, making a large V. ‘We should start to make some inroads.’ He was annoyed, and the sibilant-heavy nature of his sentence caused a detectable spray of spittle.
Menopause – well, peri-menopause actually – can make me a little snappy, defensive maybe, and I’m afraid that ‘we’ didn’t play well. I gave him short shrift and went back in and shut the door.
I feel bad about this. I don’t mind being disliked, but this skirmish between us was to set the early tone of our relationship. Perhaps I should have made an effort to like him more, been more sympathetic to the trap of upbringing and education that made him what he was. The thing is it suited me to dismiss him as arrogant. It was a knee-jerk reaction. I felt under attack and I wanted an excuse to dismiss him. If I had been honest with myself I’d have recognised that the fiddling with the T-shirt and the egg-cracking on the head performance were self-conscious. He was pretending to be relaxed. He wanted his own way, sure, but he wasn’t as confident of getting it as he affected.
So yes, I do feel sorry for him. Who wouldn’t? And it’s hard not to remember the physicality of the man, the flash of flesh above the waistband of his jeans, the hairs on the back of his meaty hands, the muscles straining beneath the white cotton of his T-shirt – a body that moved, that worked, that could make the decision to breathe deeply or throw its hands or weight around if it wanted. And I’m finding it hard as I write this not to think about that same body, cold and inert, guts spilt, prodded, poked, and sewn back together on the pathologist’s slab.
Chapter Four
Ladies blouse from Next, pink, size 12
Trichotillomania, noun. A compulsive desire to
pull out one’s own hair.
I caught her in the garden this morning. She’d got out through the kitchen, though I thought I’d locked the back door. She’d found a couple of old beer crates in the side return and had stacked them on top of each other to look over the fence. She was wearing a dressing gown and some old slippers, her hair unbrushed. The dressing gown, made of pale-pink fleece, had scraped past a bramble, and a few dried leaves clung to the bottom.
Her ankles were bare for once and the electronic tag was visible. It’s really quite clunky when you see it close up, grey and black, a bit like you’d imagine an early prototype of the Apple Watch to look. I could see the friction had caused an angry rash around the edge of the strap: another flare up of her eczema.
She spun her head when she heard my footsteps. Her lips have a naturally violet-red hue to them but this morning they looked almost blue. She said: ‘I’d like to go next door and mow the lawn.’
‘You know you can’t do that. It’s rented out. Someone else is living there at the moment.’ A French banker on a short-term contract; criminal how little he has got away with paying. At least he’s hardly there. A family would be noisier. I think the sound of children through the walls would kill her. She needs the money. Plus it was part of her bail conditions that she lived elsewhere, a condition suggested not by the CPS, but by her own lawyer. ‘It’ll look better,’ Standling had said, ‘if you’re too upset to go back into the house, if the associations are too painful.’
I didn’t think it was a good time to remind her of that.
‘I want to do some watering. It’s been so dry and the amelanchier looks miserable. It has such a fine root system, very close to the surface. It’s been disturbed so much. It doesn’t need a lot of water, but it needs some. I don’t want it to die.’
‘Shh,’ I said sharply. ‘Keep your voice down.’ I don’t like it when she reveals too much horticultural knowledge. ‘It’ll rain soon. It always does.’
She turned back and, peering over again, cried, ‘What have they done, Verity? Why have they destroyed my garden?’
I took a step towards her. I had a memory then of my sister on a climbing frame, and a second memory, a sensory one that felt like a thud in my biceps: the weight of her small body. ‘They were looking for evidence, do you remember?’ I said. ‘They had to dig it up to take away some of the plants.’
She stared at me. Her eyelids quivered. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I saw.’
She hadn’t, in fact. But she doesn’t like to admit weakness. It’s part of the new power play between us. The medication, the exhaustion of it all, has fuzzed her memory and she resents me for it. I don’t mind. I take it as a compliment. It’s the people closest to us who get the brunt of our irascibility. Fact is she had been at the police station, railing and shouting, the day the men came in the space-age suits. I was the one who watched from my upstairs window as they erected their polytunnel structure and obliterated the garden on which she had lavished so much love and money, leaving heaps of churned earth, jagged holes, gashes of lawn. It had been unsettling, creepy even, the methodology of their progress: starting at the back with the ‘wildflower’ bed, advancing to those ‘mature’ shrubs she’d spent so much money on, only at the end of the day reaching the terrace and the pots of herbs.
‘You didn’t,’ I said. ‘You weren’t here.’
She twisted away from me, craning her neck, but her sightline was restricted by the newfangled trellis she’d put up after she moved in. It’s fashioned from horizonal strips of wood and she had to bend her head at an angle to line up her eyes with a gap in the slats. Maudie was nosing around at the base of the crates and a hazel branch, which had been pinned back by Ailsa’s elbow, sprung forwards and swiped her across the cheek. She wobbled, the crates buckled and, jumping off, she threw out her hand, snagging the flesh of her palm on a thorn.
I like to think it was the shock and the pain that made her mean. ‘I can’t believe the state of your garden,’ she said. ‘It’s so dark. The holly,’ she said. ‘And the apple trees and the hazel. How much nicer your own garden would be if you cleared it and cut them right back.’ She looked around, her arms stirring the air in empty circles. ‘Tom was right. It’s out of control.’
The invitation had come sprawled on the back of a postcard: Are you free Friday, early evening, for a drink? Say 6 p.m.? Pop in if you’d like. Ailsa and Tom (no 422) xx
I’d studied it carefully. Her handwriting, not his, I was sure, due to the feminine roundness of the letters and the kisses at the end. The postcard was from one of those boxes of cards depicting notable Penguin covers. Fred had given me a carton a few Christmases back. I knew from experience you sent the best ones to people you liked, or wanted to impress. This was one of the dullest – no picture; a generic orange and white cover. Either they were getting to the bottom of the box, or I was a low-status recipient. (Incidentally it was the cover for Sinclair Lewis’s Mantrap: let’s not read anything into it.)
The wording made it sound as if it were a solo affair, but I wasn’t sure, and I made some effort with my appearance. In fact, I bought a new blouse. It was a bit small for me, and rather pink, but it was the best Trinity Hospice could provide at short notice.
I left
it as fashionably late as I could bear to and at 6.10 p.m. took the short trip from my house to theirs. The silver tractor was parked across the off-street with its boot wide open. Inside were crammed trays of bedding plants, stacked two layers high. I’m not big on flowers, so I couldn’t tell you what they were; different shades of green, squat and small; some trailing, some bushy. I peered in. There was a rich smell of earth and plastic; I sensed the quivers of tiny movements, of caterpillars and aphids. In the front was an olive tree, bound in tape, reclining stiff and straight like a dead body.
A woman I didn’t know opened the door before I had a chance to knock. She was wearing a denim mini-skirt, thick patterned wool tights, and ankle-high wellingtons, her hair pinned back in an unruly bun. She took a step back when she saw me and for a moment I thought she was going to shut the door in my face. But when I told her who I was, she gave me a long doubtful look and said, ‘Yeah, OK then, feel free,’ and went past me back to the boot. After a moment’s hesitation, I walked in unaccompanied.
I’d been in the house once or twice when the builders were still at work, but it was the first time I had seen it in its finished state. My first impression was of a moment in a film, or a dream, when the character has left their body and finds themselves in a corridor walking towards a bright light. The walls were white and bare, except for a huge silver-framed mirror above a hall shelf; the chequered Victorian floor tiles had been replaced with large slabs of pale stone, which seemed to run infinitely, and through the door on the left I glimpsed, dangling from the ceiling, an enormous chandelier apparently fashioned from swan feathers.
The Herberts’ kitchen, where I had sometimes been invited to supper, had been a fussy affair, full of knife blocks, and fridge magnets, spider plants and grandchildren’s drawings, cookery books, pots hanging precariously from an elaborate contraption above the stove. In the lower panel of their garden door was a cat flap, the plastic still black from the muddy paws of their long-dead Siamese. The room smelt – always – of garlic and curry; maybe also fish.
The Tilsons had stripped everything out, knocking through the scullery and the lean-to, and the room now seemed cavernous. A row of shiny white units and a stainless-steel industrial-style range cooker took up the right-hand side, while the sink, garlanded with shiny taps, was positioned in a central island. On the left was a spotlessly clean white enamel wood-burning stove, not in use, and a long pale wooden table. Black steel-framed doors – what I later learnt to call ‘Crittall’ – now ran along the entire back wall, framing a rectangle of garden. The whole place smelt of linseed and lavender. If houses give clues to the personalities of their occupants, and the Herberts’ interior told of retired academics with a big family and rich inner lives, this was like a show home, impossible to read. The Tilsons seemed to have stepped straight out of the pages of a magazine, to have sprung from nowhere.
I’d left the front door open behind me and the noise of the road – a constant background drag and whoosh, like the roaring of the sea – must have masked the sound of my steps because after I had descended the small staircase and was standing at the entrance to the kitchen, neither of them registered my arrival.
It’s possible, now I recall the scene, that they had in fact forgotten I was coming.
Tom was standing by the table, reading the Week. Ailsa was in front of me, looking out into the garden. She was smaller than I remembered, in Lycra leggings, trainers and a zip-up top, a further garment tied around her waist (a common appendage, I later discovered, to cover her bum). In movies you know when characters are going to kiss because the space between them shrinks; here it yawned and stretched.
I cleared my throat and like deer hearing a dog, they both turned their heads. Tom flung his magazine down onto the table with a small splat. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Welcome.’ Ailsa raised a palm in greeting. I realised then she was on the phone.
‘OK, so you’ll get an Uber,’ Ailsa said, trying to catch Tom’s eye. ‘You and Milly, right? An Uber, is that OK? I suppose so. No later than ten. I mean it. OK.’
She hung up, and noticing her hands were dirty, turned on the tap with her elbow; rinsing them, she addressed me over her shoulder: ‘Teenagers! Do you have kids?’
‘No, but I know it’s the age when they start pushing boundaries.’ I should confess here to a bit of a newspaper and magazine habit; Mother didn’t let them in the house, but I’ve made up for that since her death. It’s amazing what life tips you can pick up – particularly from the Sunday supplements. ‘The important thing is to choose your battles.’
‘I know. Right?’ she said, with an emphatic swoop and a half-laugh, a sort of delighted chirrup, as if I had just given the most insightful advice she’d ever heard. It is a trick, I know now, that tendency to agree so fulsomely with the person she’s with. But it was new to me, then, and immediately alluring.
Tom put his hand out to accept my gift – a box of mint-flavoured Matchmakers. He was wearing the same bulky white trainers, but a different pair of jeans, wider in the leg with orange stitching along the seams.
‘We didn’t get off to a very good start the other day,’ he said. ‘I didn’t have a chance to introduce myself properly. I’m Tom.’
‘And I’m Ailsa,’ Ailsa said, switching off the tap and anointing her hands with thick cream from a tube.
‘Yes. Verity. Verity Ann Baxter.’
‘Nice to meet you, Verity Ann Baxter,’ Tom said, giving me a wide, warm smile. He put the chocolates down and reached out his hand to shake mine. He was studying me now, with close attention. I felt a matching fuchsia to my shirt creep into my cheeks. ‘What can I get you? Tea, coffee . . .?’ He clasped his hands together, making a small clap. ‘Gin?’
I hesitated for a moment and then said: ‘A gin and tonic would be lovely.’
He found a glass in one of the high cupboards and held it to the light, checking it passed muster before pouring in two caps of London gin, and a slosh of tonic. The ice he removed from a drawer in the fridge with a small metal shovel. His movements were tight and precise. ‘Now, lemon . . .’ he said, finding a tiny sharp knife.
A shadow flashed across the window – the woman in the wellies coming from the side return with a tray of plants. ‘Oh God, I should be helping,’ Ailsa said. ‘Come and see what I’m doing. It’s so exciting.’
I followed her across the kitchen and out through the open door. The Herberts hadn’t been big gardeners, but there had been grass, bushes and a shed. All that had gone. A wide terrace had been made out of the same large pale beige stones as the kitchen floor. Beds had been freshly dug and something at the end that was either a sunken trampoline or a pond. The sky was heavy and leaden, a typical March sky. A blackbird or two pecked in the churned soil, but otherwise it was gloomy.
‘Isn’t it great?’ Ailsa said. ‘I was quite Japanese zen in Kent, but at the back there I’m planting cow parsley, poppies, cornflowers; lovely meadow flowers like that.’
The woman in the wellies had put down the tray and, hands on her waist, was stretching out her back. ‘Cornflowers aren’t actually meadow flowers,’ she said. ‘They’d only last a year in a permanent meadow. They need the soil to be turned; it’s why they used to grow in ploughed fields – before herbicides wiped them out.’
‘Yes of course.’ Ailsa was smiling. ‘Centaurea cyanus are annuals, of course.’
‘The members of the papaver are the same.’
‘I should probably talk about wildflowers, not meadow flowers.’
‘Don’t worry. It’s a common mistake.’
Ailsa was still smiling. ‘Not so much a mistake. A slip of the tongue.’
It was the first time I saw Delilah and Ailsa together, and I noticed the tension in this dialogue. But it didn’t seem odd. People as they get older often seem to get more competitive with each other: all those tensely polite debates about driving routes, and holiday destinations, they’re often irrationally personal and invested.
‘This is Delilah,�
�� Ailsa said. ‘She’s a professional garden designer. I garden for love, she gardens for money. Anyway, lucky me, she took me to her nursery today; it’s trade, so much cheaper.’
‘We’ve got our work cut out for us.’ Delilah lifted her chin, pointing to the back. ‘It was very neglected. Also, a high water table.’
‘Underwater streams,’ I said. ‘Tributaries to the Wandle. And when people dig out their basements, well, they get diverted.’ I smiled. My intention was not to antagonise. ‘It’s the price of change.’
‘You can’t create without first destroying.’
‘Like much in life,’ I said.
Delilah gave me a long look. ‘I think I’ve seen you on the common,’ she said. ‘Are you the woman who feeds the birds?’
‘Sometimes I do, yes.’
She nodded, then turned back to Ailsa. ‘Listen, babe, I’ve got to go.’ She kissed her on the cheek. ‘Don’t forget the rest of the plants. Shrubs are being delivered tomorrow.’ She walked away from us through the doors into the kitchen. Ailsa and I followed. ‘Tom?’ Delilah said. ‘The olive’s still in the front seat. If you’re feeling strong?’
He was leaning against the island, looking at his phone. At this, he lifted his chin, raising his hand and waving goodbye without looking up.
Delilah flipped him the finger, which he must have seen out of the corner of his eye, because he flipped it back.
‘Delilah and Tom are old friends,’ Ailsa said. ‘They were at school together.’
‘We used to snog,’ Delilah said, hoping, I think, to shock.
‘Wonders never cease,’ I said before I could stop myself. Ailsa, who’d been following Delilah up to the hall, turned with surprise as if she’d underestimated me. I winked at her and she grinned back. It’s hard to put my finger on why it was funny, but it was the moment, I think, that we saw something in each other; a shared sense of the absurd, perhaps, an instinct to undercut the posturing of others.
Finders, Keepers: The mesmerising new thriller from the author of LIE WITH ME Page 3
