by Ali Knight
For the Russian, Oblomov, the loss was more personal. Because he owned his entire company, he was the father of every success but also every failure. How Qatari Futures, the third losing bidder on the Vauxhall site, were reacting, I didn’t know.
Gabe was not paying attention to my arrangements for the party, he was asking Lily about her plans for the summer. Her mane of hair swung from side to side, her naval ring glinted, her luscious flesh, ripe as fruit, hung heavy, ready to pluck. Gabe was a flirt; Lily was young and beautiful. It was a story as old as time. I didn’t bear Lily any ill will. She would grow to learn which attentions to ignore and which to encourage. If she knew what was good for her she’d avoid married men. But the glimpse I got of the woman in green showed me she wasn’t young, she was around my age – old enough to know better, mature enough not to care. This scared me more than Lily explaining to Gabe about spiralising and clean eating and him pretending to be interested.
‘Has everything been going OK at work?’ Alice asked Gabe. ‘I’ll always have your back, you know.’ It was a strange question coming from Alice, she couldn’t usually see her Poppa as anything other than heroic and irreproachable. ‘If it’s to do with work you know you can talk to me, I really want to understand how it all works.’
There was something ghastly about his face, a look I’d never seen before. Who are you? I thought. Who is this man I sleep next to every night? We all have secrets, but what are yours?
‘This house is just so mega, Mr Moreau.’ Lily was spinning round in her socks on the slippery kitchen tiles.
The conversation was killed by Lily turning on the blender and a deafening noise reverberating off every hard surface in the kitchen. I slammed my hands over my ears, tension jumping up my spine. Gabe and I were left staring at each other, my suspicions swirling as if the noise was our marriage crumbling to rubble.
I turned and closed the curtains so Maggie couldn’t look in. Some things had to remain private. She didn’t get to know about Alice’s life. Alice had nothing to do with my disintegrating marriage.
CHAPTER 13
Alice
Six weeks and three days before
When I got back from work Lily came round, hunting for ways to relieve her pressing boredom. I suggested a job. She flopped back on the bed as if exhausted and then began to try on lots of my clothes, then left them lying round my bedroom like litter at a festival. Her boredom left her roaming from subject to subject, until she landed on Momma’s death. Most people didn’t ask, or didn’t dare, but Lily was either more curious or didn’t care about offending me. I gave her the benefit of the doubt. I said it was difficult.
‘Do you ever cry about it?’
I hesitated. ‘Yes,’ I lied. I often lied about Momma. I gave them a version I thought they wanted to hear. The truth was, I didn’t shed tears over her; I had been too young and I had never known her.
She asked how I got on with Helene. She was watching me, waiting for me to join her in a bitchfest about my stepmother. But just because she wanted to do that didn’t mean I was going to comply. I was better than that, I reassured myself. I felt loyal to Helene. ‘She’s great,’ I said. I sensed a moment of disappointment from Lily, who threw her phone in disgust down on the bed and turned to stare at the ceiling.
‘I’m so bored,’ she sighed. She pulled herself on to her elbows as a new thought struck her. ‘Your dad is really hot, who would have thought it?’ I felt weird when she said that. I hated her for a moment, really hated her. ‘What?’ she said defensively. ‘Sometimes when you look at me like that it’s kinda creepy.’
‘He’s just a wrinkly old bag of bones.’
Lily screamed in scandalised delight. ‘Alice! Yeah, he’s kinda old, but he’s got charisma. It’s like he notices you when he looks at you.’
I felt the old pull of protection. I needed to change the subject. ‘We could go for a walk.’
She looked blank. ‘A what?’
‘Never mind.’ I said there were lollies in the freezer and she asked if they were Innocent ones and I said I think so and then she was kinda interested and we ambled downstairs to loll about on different designer furniture.
Helene was fussing around with a checklist for a fundraiser she was holding and so we decided to make smoothies. Poppa came in and mixed himself a stiff one. I could see the gin glugging from the bottle. ‘Has everything been going OK at work?’ I asked Poppa. ‘You seem a bit distracted.’ I was thinking about the notes I had found.
Poppa escaped having to answer as Lily started the blender and the crunching ice cubes roared in the machine. It was too loud for anyone to speak.
I saw Helene putting her hands over her ears. That wasn’t necessary, Helene! You were Heleneing! My stepmother thought this kitchen was acoustically challenged but she was wrong. It was modern, it was now, it was right.
I was the driver behind the makeover of this house from a warren of damp rooms and skittering spiders into the sleek, Cubist flow we enjoyed now. Lily loved the white tiles so much she did the splits on them in her socks. When Poppa or Helene expressed reservations about the cost or the upheaval (it took six months living in a rented flat while they took the back wall away) I had to put them right. No half measures, no compromises. A property developer had to practise what he preached. His house needed to exemplify the happy domestic fantasy; he needed to be living in the dream. And he was.
The house was unrecognisable when we’d finished. I even had to show Helene how to use the remote-controlled fire in the living room; she kept saying it was too modern and complicated, but she was only a few years older than Poppa and he didn’t have a problem with it. Honestly, she seemed to create problems where none existed. I’ve always suspected that Helene is a closet fantasist. It goes hand in hand with egotism. She thinks it’s all about her, but that’s a view held by only one person.
CHAPTER 14
Alice
Six weeks and two days before
Today Poppa drove us to a site visit in Vauxhall. We got to see how Connaught Tower was progressing, how it was leading the regeneration of a forgotten and run-down part of inner London. Lily was here too as Poppa invited her last night.
From the car I could see the skyscraper soaring skywards. ‘Wow, it’s amazing, Poppa.’
‘It’s important to remember, Alice, that what you’re looking at are homes, not just steel and glass. This is where a new community will put down roots. This is the future – mixed developments like these make the new London, and I’m so lucky to be part of it, in shaping a world city.’
He’s like that, my poppa – when he turns his attention on you, it’s as if you’re basking in the glow of a thousand suns.
I could understand how Helene fell for him, how he fell for her. When he dropped the fateful line, ‘There’s someone I want you to meet,’ my world screeched to a violent, shuddering halt. I hated him then, so much, and oh how I wanted to loathe the very guts of this Helene! But I didn’t. I couldn’t. You couldn’t hate someone who tried. She was nice. More than one person said I was very mature for handling it so well.
Soon after I met her, Helene became my stepmother. It was a small wedding. There were Poppa’s friends from work and a scattering of Helene’s friends from here, there and everywhere – but no one from when she was young and no family. Poppa and Helene are quite alike in that respect; it was one of the things that brought them together, I imagined. They don’t cling to the past. But it was important to note that I don’t hold a life of many different incarnations against anyone. Reinvention was no bad thing, I believed. If you want to leave a place and people behind, why not? Why do we assume loyalty to those who happen to come from the same place is important or a sign of a good character?
Helene and Poppa have never had children. She couldn’t. She would have been a good mother, I think. But if I was being selfish, I guess I was glad. It meant there was only me to dote over!
Poppa parked and we got out and that was when I noticed the pr
otestors, about thirty of them, waving placards and shouting.
‘Who are they?’ Lily asked.
‘Luddites,’ I spat.
‘Now, now, Alice,’ Poppa said. ‘People always protest when change happens. It goes with the territory, but we’re trying to get a deal that suits everyone. They want homes, we want to build them—’
‘But homes can’t get built unless we can make a profit!’
‘Yes, but it’s a question of degree. How much profit is enough? We have to strike a balance that suits everybody. They say we make too much, the company directors say we make too little.’
Lily was listening with her head cocked to one side, her curtain of dark hair flowing over her shoulder, but I was annoyed, I thought Poppa was too nuanced. He needed to see things in black and white if he was to continue being successful. He needed to get with the binary idea of good versus bad. I was standing on the side of good. I had never had any problem with that.
The straggly crowd, comprised of shapeless men in tracksuits and women pushing buggies, was chanting ‘hands off our estate’.
I turned my back on the protestors and walked into the marketing suite set up in the unfinished building. Men in suits and women in high heels milled around. Lily and I looked at computer-generated images of what the building and the larger area would look like when completed. It was pleasingly ordered and regulated, clean and tidy.
Poppa came back from shaking a series of hands and led us through into the foyer of Connaught Tower. It was lit with arc lights as the plate glass was still on order and the windows were covered with board, but we could see a soaring ceiling and a wide, shallow hole in the ground where a fountain would one day burble and flow. ‘It’s been designed by an artist in Shadwell,’ Poppa said. ‘It’s going to be the biggest indoor fountain in London, and the wall over there,’ he waved his hand across the hole, ‘is going to be clad in limestone, quarried in Wales. This building is a celebration of British craftsmanship.’
I was saying how amazing it all looked when Poppa caught the arm of a man passing by and introduced us. ‘Girls, this is Milo Bandacharian.’ A guy in his twenties with olive skin and very dark green eyes held out his hand. God, he was so hot he made my stomach flip! I mumbled my name and stood there awkwardly, but Poppa came to the rescue. ‘Milo is a local resident. He helps keep communication open between us and the people who live nearby.’ Poppa’s attention was taken by a woman with a clipboard and he left us to talk to a group of men.
Lily began to talk to Milo. ‘Aren’t you hated by the buggy brigade out there and ignored by the suits in here?’
Milo shrugged. ‘The way I see it, you have to try and negotiate the best deal with developers, make sure the community’s voice is heard, otherwise you can end up with nothing,’ Milo said. ‘When this area where we’re standing was going to be redeveloped, there were originally going to be twenty-three social homes out of seventy, now because we helped GWM win the bid, it’s up to sixty-three. Every council home saved is a new start for an ordinary family.’ He paused. ‘It’s nice to see that Gabe’s daughter is taking an interest in the family business.’
‘I’m not his daughter,’ Lily said, ‘she is,’ and pointed at me.
Milo looked round and I felt uncomfortable, but not in the way I had with Mr Dewhurst. There were a thousand things I wanted to say, and no hope of saying any of them.
‘Where are you from anyway? What kind of name is that?’ Lily asked.
I wasn’t sure that was a particularly polite question, but I really wanted to hear the answer.
‘One of my grandmothers was French Polynesian by way of New Zealand, my dad was Irish, my mother’s half Pakistani and I grew up here in Vauxhall.’
‘Wow,’ grinned Lily. ‘Sounds like there’s been shagging on nearly every continent.’
I was shocked but Milo laughed. ‘Let’s hope they had a lot of fun.’ He turned to me. ‘I like your dad. He listens and he lets me keep him in line.’
‘Everyone likes him. There’s nothing original in that,’ I snapped.
He grinned and didn’t seem to be put off by my barb and suggested we all went outside. I thought we were going to stand in the sunshine but he invited us to go and meet the protesters. ‘Oh no,’ I began, but Lily seemed keen and followed Milo over. Lily is the kind of girl who would poke an ant’s nest, just to see what happens. I was forced to follow.
The protesters were less intimidating up close. Everyone smiled and said hello and mingled. I drank in every movement of Milo’s, from the way he shoved a hand into his jeans pocket to the shrug of his left shoulder, but the sun tracked round the edge of a building and shone directly at me and I had to shield my eyes with my hand.
‘That’s amazing,’ I heard Milo say. ‘The sun has made a halo of your hair.’ The look of rapture on his face made me put my hand on my head as if I was so stupid I had to check that my hair was still there, when really I should have been putting it on my heart, to stop it jumping into my throat. Milo was distracted by a guy stretching an arm over his shoulder and he turned reluctantly away.
A few moments later he came towards Lily and me and handed me a flyer. It listed bands and artists I’d never heard of against a swirling blue background. ‘You two should come to this. There are so many vacant buildings round here waiting to be demolished, they’re the best places for parties at the moment.’ He pointed behind him at a crumbling Victorian-style building with a large weed growing from the side of its roof. ‘The demolition order on that has been approved. We’re having an event in there on Friday night.’
‘This is so cool,’ Lily said, staring at the flyer. I could see the gleam in her eye, her voracious need to experience life, as Poppa walked towards us. ‘We are so going to this,’ Lily whispered as we retreated back to the car.
Milo would be there. Nothing was going to keep me away. Nothing.
CHAPTER 15
Maggie
Six weeks and two days before
On Wednesday Gabe drove Alice and her friend who we’d seen throwing some indecent gymnastics moves in the kitchen of Moreau’s house to his construction project in Vauxhall. We passed the usual hoardings advertising luxury flats to the tax dodgers of the world who laundered their money through London bricks and mortar. We drove into a schizophrenic neighbourhood, one of the many in the capital that were in the process of being cleansed of everything that had been before. A scrappy city farm giving off the stench of manure cuddled up to a collection of low-rise, rain-stained council blocks with faded signs telling kids not to play ball games on an inviting patch of grass. Beyond sat a half-completed tower of glass and steel where Gabe parked and got out and disappeared behind high wooden hoardings. Many of the doors and windows on the estate were boarded with steel screens, the council’s anti-squatting paraphernalia nailed in place. The former inhabitants were being moved out and away to cheaper locations.
There were a collection of official-looking cars parked outside the tower and knots of well-dressed people entering it. A short distance away a group of protestors with home-made banners were shouting ‘Hands off our estate’. A little later Alice and her friend came back out with a young guy in jeans and began to talk to some of the protestors and then Gabe arrived, and shortly afterwards the protesters began to disperse. Less than forty-five minutes after he arrived, Gabe was driving back to the office.
That evening Gabe drove back to Vauxhall alone. The sun was a low ball of fire on the Thames as we crossed over to the south side of the river.
Gabe parked in a different place this time, tight to a white van and out of sight of the road. I watched in my rear-view mirror as he cut across the scrubby grass surrounding Connaught Tower and let himself in. He seemed a different man now, furtive and watchful; he looked behind him several times as he fiddled with the padlock key on the door in the wooden protection wall.
I debated following him in and leaving Simona to watch the outside, but then we didn’t need to. A short while later Gab
e appeared on the fifth floor, a solitary figure standing amongst exposed steel girders and scaffolding and full in the wind; the windows were not in place yet. He stood there for nearly ten minutes, staring out across London at the setting sun.
‘What’s he doing?’ Simona asked.
‘Hell if I know.’
He stopped staring out at the city and fumbled in his jacket pocket for his phone and began to text. A few moments later he was distracted by something in his trouser pocket and he pulled out another phone and answered it. At that moment I knew I had won. Helene had never mentioned two phones – I was sure that one of them she didn’t know about. I knew I had rumbled Gabe Moreau. I had the feeling I would need just a couple more days to wrap it up, if that.
The conversation was short, less than a minute, and Gabe remained unsmiling throughout, before he hung up and moved out of sight. A couple of minutes later he was getting back into his car. A short call normally means a meeting is being arranged. And we would be ready and waiting to get the damning evidence we needed for his wife.
That’s all it takes to deliver the fatal blow to a marriage.
CHAPTER 16
Helene
Six weeks before
Earlier this morning I went back to Praed Street for a follow-up meeting. Maggie was in a look-at-me-and-fight-me-for-it outfit: tight-fitting red skirt, a silver blouse and black stilettos, and radiating a good mood. We were alone, Simona and Rory presumably out tailing my husband.
