by Ali Knight
‘What do you think?’
‘He can’t! There’s no way.’
We argued the issue for a while but I eventually sided with Rory. He didn’t know about us.
We were still arguing the finer points of it when we saw Gabe come out of the office at five thirty and cross the road and go into the Langham Hotel.
I moved to get out of the taxi but Rory had his hand on the door. ‘I’ll go,’ he said.
‘No, I’m going.’
‘But he knows you – it has to be me!’
I was out and crossing the street before Rory could react. I looked back and could see him throwing his hands up in frustration, banging on the window of the taxi and swearing inside the hot metal. I heard my phone beeping and turned it off.
As the door of the hotel swung shut behind me, all the noise and desperation of the city was sucked away. It was cool and quiet in the hotel. Gabe was not in the lobby. I glanced into the bar and saw him pulling out a stool.
I headed down the stairs to the toilets and fluffed my hair and sprayed some perfume over my sweat and drew on some lipstick.
I came back upstairs and threw open the door to the bar.
I love a hotel bar. It’s the anonymity, the silence, the thick stylish menus brim full with enticing alcoholic combinations; it’s not knowing where the evening will end.
I began to walk across the room and did an obvious double take and headed over to Gabe. ‘Hello there.’ He looked up, confused. ‘Blenders, do you remember, for show flats?’ I lamely explained. There was a beat of silence. ‘I really do make a lasting impression! I sat next to you in the bar under the office a couple of days ago. I work in the same building as you.’
‘Sorry, yes, of course!’ He smiled and I tried not to look offended, though I was. I forced myself to relax. This was all good news for Helene, I reminded myself. I didn’t sit, I hovered, as if I was leaving my options open. ‘I’m waiting for a friend, but she’s always late, and I always hope that she isn’t going to be late.’
‘Please, take a seat,’ he said and grabbed a stool for me. ‘How was your launch?’ he asked politely.
‘Really good.’ Positivity worked best with men. No one liked a moaner. ‘So, have you been sat at your desk all day in this heat?’
‘No, I had to get on the Tube, worst luck.’
I grimaced. ‘It’s horrible in this heat. I hope you didn’t have to go far.’ He didn’t answer. ‘Arriving for a business meeting all hot and bothered just puts you on the back foot before you’ve started.’
The barman brought Gabe a drink, meaning he didn’t have to answer. I had to let it slide. ‘Are you waiting to meet someone, or are you having an affair with the barman?’ It was a lame thing to say but I got a response.
He smiled. ‘My daughter’s on her way. She’s just finishing up something.’
‘So you and she are close.’
‘I guess we are.’
‘I love it in here,’ I added, not having to lie at all.
‘Yes, so do I. I used to work in a hotel. It brings back memories.’
‘Oh? Which hotel?’
He looked at me with piercing brown eyes. ‘Back in the former Yugoslavia. But there’s not much call for a hotel in a war zone.’
‘I see what you mean. Did you come here, during that war?’
He nodded and took a sip. ‘It was more terrible than you can imagine.’
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to remind you of bad times.’
He waved my comment aside. ‘Life is full of good and bad things. They seem to go together.’
‘Don’t they just,’ I added. ‘I guess your daughter is one of the good things.’
He smiled into his drink, sad and fond at the same time. It was the smile a father gives his child, an expression of pure, intergenerational love. That kind of bond is uncomplicated, unlike romantic love, which is compromised, angry, deceitful and constantly negotiated.
He nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘Is she like your wife?’
‘My wife?’ He looked confused for a moment, as if I’d dragged him back from another mental place entirely. ‘Oh no, she’s not at all like my wife.’ He saw my face. ‘I mean, my first wife died.’
‘Oh. I’m so sorry.’
‘Don’t be. It was a long time ago now.’
‘How old was your daughter when your wife died?’
‘Just two.’
‘That’s terrible,’ I sighed. ‘Was her death sudden, if you don’t mind me asking?’
He nodded. ‘Yes, it was.’ He didn’t look at me as he spoke.
‘Was it difficult to rebuild your life after that?’
‘It changed a lot of things.’
‘Do you think your relationship with her is different from other fathers and daughters?’ I probed.
‘I think it’s impossible to know. Other people say we have an intense relationship, I guess.’ He shrugged. ‘But I feel that I’m talking about myself. What about you? Do you have a family?’
I shook my head. ‘No, that life isn’t for me.’
‘Well, that might change.’
‘I like no ties. It’s exciting.’ I stared at him, but he didn’t bite; he looked like he was thinking about something else.
He became animated. ‘You know, I look at my daughter and I marvel, really. Her life is so safe, and that makes me so happy. That’s what I work for every day, for that moment when I can lie down and go to sleep and know that I protected her, that the chaos I saw as a young man won’t happen to her.’
I took a long gulp of my drink. ‘I’m glad you feel that way, but chaos can exist anywhere, not just in a war zone. I mean, look at me, I never knew my dad, I never want to remember my mum and I don’t have children. My relationships are all – in the moment, shall we say.’
‘But are you happy?’
I made a snorting sound. ‘Only the unhappy ask that.’ I glanced up at him. He was staring at me over the rim of his drink, enjoying my discomfort. ‘Jesus, I don’t know. It’s a work in progress.’
He smiled. ‘Let’s drink to a work in progress.’
‘Too fucking right. Cheers.’
He took a long drink and took the cocktail stick out of his glass. He pulled the plump green olive off with his teeth, giving me a glimpse into his mouth.
There was silence as he chewed his olive. His eyes were roaming across my body, taking in my neck, boobs, hips and legs, but I sensed vague appreciation rather than hard, cold desire. I held my breath. I felt conflicted, which was unusual. If I did my job well I’d eventually catch Gabe out. Yet I didn’t want to. He seemed like a nice guy. I wanted him to be the exception to my succession of cheats and liars. I wanted him to be good and I wanted Helene to be wrong. I looked away.
When I looked back up, his eye was on Alice standing in the doorway.
CHAPTER 31
Alice
Four weeks and one day before
I followed the old tart who was pushing her tits in Poppa’s face to the toilets. The flush started and she opened the door and turned to the basin to wash her hands.
‘I hear you work in Sentinel House?’ I said.
She looked at me in the mirror as she flicked water off her hands. ‘That’s right.’
‘I’ll keep an eye out for you.’ Her hands stopped moving. ‘So I can make sure you stay well away from my poppa. Low-rent flirts aren’t his style.’
She stared back at me and wiped her hands on a little square of towel. ‘Does he have form?’
She stayed calm, she wasn’t shocked or outraged, and I felt the anger building. I knew my instincts were correct, this woman had brawled in streets before, she had had too much to drink and swung at chins and cheekbones, she was dangerous to Poppa. ‘Stay away from him or you’ll be sorry.’
‘With respect, I think that’s for him to decide.’ She threw the towel in the hamper and waited.
‘Leave him alone!’ I shouted.
I was sweating as I walked
back into the bar. Men like Poppa are easy pickings for money-grabbing vultures like the slag in the toilets. They can smell his kindness and his money like rotting meat. They have no shame. Once again I see myself as Poppa’s saviour.
Poppa was placing the drained martini glass down on the little circle of paper on the bar when I came back. ‘Poppa, why do you end up talking to such random people when you’re just trying to relax?’
‘I was having fun.’
I made the barman get Poppa a fizzy water with a twist of lemon. ‘Helene should thank me, is what she should do.’
‘Why, darling?’
‘Come on, Poppa, this family is like a seesaw. You and Helene sit at either end, and I’m the fulcrum in the middle. Don’t look so confused. If I wasn’t underpinning it all, you two would crash to earth pretty quickly.’
Poppa picked up the drink and took a sip but pushed it away when he realised it was water. ‘I don’t understand that analogy at all.’
‘Poppa, you’re so silly! Without me, there would be no balance at all. See?’
CHAPTER 32
Maggie
Four weeks and one day before
Rory had worked for the Blue and White for five years. Those years had by and large been a seamless meeting of minds, but he was a strong personality and sometimes Rory and I fought. And very rarely Rory and I almost came to blows over decisions taken or not.
I left Gabe and Alice to their family love-in in the hotel and headed back out to the street, seeing Rory parked on the far side of the road.
He did a U-ey in the street and swung round to get me. I grasped the handle of the taxi but he shunted the vehicle up the street and stopped, the engine running. I walked forwards, and he did it again, and again, and again, half the way up Regent Street.
I was simmering with rage by the time he finally let me get in the back of the taxi. He began pointing at me through the gap where the money passed, calling me every name under the sun and more besides. ‘You fuckin’ eejit’ was just one he landed.
‘I suppose you ran into the daughter too, just to blow your chances even more.’
‘She called me a low-rent flirt.’
‘Jesus H Christ! You’ll have to hire some freelancers – you can’t go anywhere near him now! What were you thinking? You’ve lost your head. You used to be so strict about following the rules – no contact more than once; what’s so special about this guy?’
‘Oh come on, Rory, it’s not that serious.’
‘I don’t like it, not at all. And don’t you ever run off and leave me to mind this metal prison any more – you hear me! I’m not your poodle that you get to kick every once in a while!’ He turned away and slammed his foot on the accelerator, which threw me back against the seats in an untidy backwards roll, my legs and stilettos akimbo, my neck crunched.
I took my punishment like a man.
CHAPTER 33
Helene
Four weeks and one day before
‘Has Gabe had an affair before?’ Maggie asked.
It was the casual way the question was posed that gave me an atavistic sense of wariness. I was sitting by the window in Maggie’s office on Praed Street, the rumble of buses outside making the windows shake, as if a faint earthquake was subtly reshaping the world under our feet.
Maggie was relating the details of her honeytrap on my husband and how she had failed. As she described their two after-work drinks she made it sound like she’d had a great time. She got out of her large leather chair and came round to the front of her desk and leaned her bum back on it and crossed her arms. I sensed disappointment and frustration that she hadn’t been able to manipulate Gabe. What did you expect, I thought sourly, that I was married to an arsehole? Maggie was underestimating him, and me. I had already told her that that was a mistake.
‘I mean it wasn’t all a bust, I got somewhere – he talked a lot about his past before he came to the UK, so it was certainly fruitful,’ Maggie said.
I was dumbfounded and covered my shock by hunting through my bag for a headache pill. Gabe never talked about his past with me. ‘What did he mention specifically?’ I managed to say.
‘The hotel he used to work in, family, that type of thing.’
I drank some water and washed down the pill, watched Maggie through narrowed lids. These subjects were off limits to the man I married, areas where I had probed and prodded and always been rebuffed. I was vain enough to think that what he wouldn’t reveal to me he wouldn’t reveal to a passing stranger over a martini. I wondered if she was lying, or if Gabe was. But to what end? Maggie was smart enough and cynical enough to have wondered whether Gabe was tainted by Milo’s death or if he was involved somehow. She would have talked through with Rory and Simona the likelihood of the Blue and White being used by me, but why would she need to lie to me here and now?
A darker thought came to me. Maybe Maggie’s cynical heart was vulnerable after all. Maybe Gabe had simply turned her head.
‘So has he ever had an affair?’ she repeated.
I pulled out some chewing gum and put it in my mouth. It tasted like dust. I shook my head. ‘Not that I know of.’ I was being noncommittal, when I should have told her straight. Never. He would never do that to me. I had been that certain, would have staked my life on it, before I saw that woman in the cloakroom. But now? Now my chaos swirled around me. I had thought finding out this detail about Gabe would affect my marriage, but I hadn’t realised that my life was a Jenga tower, where if one section is examined, other areas get pulled out of shape until the entire structure crashes to the floor.
I felt Gabe and now Maggie had stripped me of all my certainties, of my power. I was flailing, and I didn’t like it at all.
Maggie walked back to her seat and sat down. ‘I have to tell you something else that happened. We lost Gabe for two hours.’
I was stunned. ‘Where do you think he went?’
‘We don’t know. It does sometimes happen that we lose someone we are watching, but it is unusual.’
She wasn’t embarrassed or contrite that she had failed. What am I paying you for? I silently fumed. I shifted on my seat, looked out the window at the new high-rises looming behind Paddington Station. A thrum of anxiety began. ‘Does he know you’re following him?’
Maggie at least considered the question for a long time. ‘Rory and I had a talk about it. I don’t see how he can. I think it was coincidence. But we’ll make sure it never happens again.’
‘Have you seen him using this other phone again?’
Maggie shook her head.
There was a pause. She was waiting to see how I would react. It was time to put the heat back on to her. ‘Tell me something, have you ever got involved with your clients before?’
‘Involved?’
‘Oh, I don’t know, ended up liking them more than you should, that type of thing? I mean, it’s risky to play-act, isn’t it? You see movies about undercover cops who end up really becoming like the drug dealers they are trying to catch.’
‘You’re flattering me,’ Maggie said. ‘Undercover work for the police is different gravy. They are living twenty-four hours a day with constant threat for months on end. Catching a cheat usually only takes a few weeks, as I’ve said before.’
I gave Maggie a thin smile. The way she said it was dismissive, as if it was small-scale, humdrum. This was my life, my everything. Be very careful with the weight I am handing to you, I thought. ‘Would you say that these meetings with Gabe are fruitful?’ I pressed.
Maggie nodded. ‘Yes, but there’s just one problem. When I was having a drink with Gabe in the Langham, Alice arrived. She saw me.’
‘Oh no.’
‘She’s very protective of her dad, isn’t she?’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘I sensed she was suspicious of what I was doing with Gabe.’
Did she have a reason to be? I was thinking.
‘But she needn’t have been,’ Maggie continued. ‘He was lit
erally telling me how much he loved his daughter.’
It was like she had punched me in my defective womb. I knew Maggie was blunt and could be rude, but she had no idea how much she had hurt me at that moment. I felt the absence at my centre, the children I never had, the love Gabe would have given them. Would the woman in the green dress have even existed if I had been able to have children? Would a child have kept him closer? I stood on shaking feet, keen to be gone.
‘So we’ll continue as we have been,’ Maggie said and I nodded.
She crossed the room and opened the door for me. ‘I’m not going to charge you for today. I’m sorry that I lost him. I know this is difficult for you, even if I don’t show it.’
I was mute. It was too little too late. I wasn’t big-hearted or generous enough to respond.
CHAPTER 34
Alice
Four weeks before
Success has many fathers and failure none. And I had to admit, Helene’s charity event made me appreciate my stepmother anew. I thought she was prone to too much introspection and self-regard, but the way she separated the guests from their money that night was like watching a master at work.
As an intern for GWM, I helped set up the party. It was at the office because there was a function room with large windows with a view over the West End. The set designers arrived in the morning and were there all day creating a venue that shouted sophistication and fun. There was a small kitchen at the back through which a production line of workers unwrapped and prepared canapés, while crates of champagne were stacked in the corridor by the service lift.
There was a buzzy atmosphere at work all day, with people peering in and commenting on the transformation, though only a small number of employees would be staying for the evening.
Helene had exploited every connection she had in the TV and PR worlds and all week items that were to be auctioned off had been couriered in – autographed football shirts, never-used designer handbags, spa holidays in five-star resorts. Helene had curried favour with an auctioneer who worked at Sotheby’s and he was overseeing the event. The target was to raise a hundred thousand pounds for a charity that gave educational opportunities to disadvantaged young people in the capital.
