BISHOPSGATE
LONDON
From her position at one side of the room, Rory Statham had been keeping an eye on everything, so she saw Caroline Goldacre’s manoeuvre. As was her wont, Caroline had been trying to hurry Clare along. This was something that Caroline saw as her job. “Clare’s minder,” she said in reference to herself. “God only knows how she’d get anything done if I didn’t keep her on task.”
Rory found this claim curious. She herself had been working with Clare Abbott from the time of her first book—a brilliant and brilliantly reviewed polemic called The Uterine Dilemma that had sold a discouraging 3,561 copies before it sank into permanent obscurity—and as Clare’s editor she’d cajoled the writer over the creation of ten other volumes and countless articles for demanding publications to make her work more accessible to the ordinary reader. Looking for Mr. Darcy was the result of that cajoling, and Rory was enjoying Clare’s success as much as Clare was. She wasn’t, however, entirely enjoying the presence of Caroline Goldacre in Clare’s life and although she’d tried to question Clare more than once about employing the woman as her assistant, she’d not got far in learning what the attraction was. Clare had never seemed to need someone to sort her, monitor her, mind her, or otherwise keep her on track, but for quite some time, Caroline Goldacre had been doing just that.
“I could always use a bit more organisation in my life” was how Clare had explained it. Rather too breezily, Rory thought. Her own conclusion was that something more was going on.
Jealous, Rory? she asked herself.
She didn’t feel jealous. But she certainly felt something.
So when she’d seen Clare in laughing conversation with the tee-shirt woman, she’d watched their interaction, and she’d seen Caroline watching it as well. She knew what the outcome would be once Caroline followed the tee-shirt woman out of the room. So she waited until Caroline returned, her expression announcing that all had gone according to her wishes. At that point, Rory herself left the meeting room with Arlo trotting at her side. She headed in the direction of the stairway, and she caught the tee-shirt woman up.
She said to her, “I beg your pardon . . . ?” and she scooped Arlo up from the floor, tucking him beneath one arm so his weight was balanced on her hip. He settled against her. He was quite used to this procedure in which he became something akin to a canine shield. The shield allowed Rory to ignore her own racing heart.
The woman turned. She was remarkably ill dressed, although Rory couldn’t blame her. The heat inside the building was intolerable and had she not believed in looking professional when appearing with one of her authors, she might have dressed in a similar manner sans slogan printed across her chest. The woman slung a blob-like shoulder bag into position and used the back of her wrist to blot the perspiration on her upper lip.
Rory joined her at the head of the stairs. “I couldn’t help seeing that Ms. Goldacre followed you out of the room.” She looked back at the doorway and shifted her topic to say, “Well. Right. That’s not quite true. I make it my business to keep an eye on things when it comes to Clare, so I was watching. I saw her give you her card, I saw you leave, I saw Caroline follow, and I have an idea what happened from there.” She set Arlo on the floor for a moment and worked her shoulder bag open. She dug within it to find her card case, from which she extricated one of Clare’s cards and one of her own. As she did this, she said, “Something tells me you’re not a stalker.”
“I’m a cop,” the woman replied. “Barbara Havers,” she added.
“Ah. Well, Ms. Goldacre is sometimes too dedicated to keeping Clare safe from what she considers undesirable elements who might lure her from her assigned task of writing and lecturing. I, on the other hand, know that nothing and no one on earth can lure Clare Abbott from her work because she thrives upon it. She wanted you to have her card for some reason, so . . .” Rory extended it to Barbara. But before Barbara could reach for it, Rory said, “You’re not, right? I mean, a stalker. You’re not just claiming to be a cop?”
Barbara Havers tucked her copy of Looking for Mr. Darcy under her arm and fished inside her own shoulder bag. She brought forth a tattered wallet. From this she took her police warrant card as well as a business card printed with her name and all the relevant details that established her as part of the team “working together for a safer London” from Victoria Block in New Scotland Yard. Rory looked at the one and took the other in hand. She saw that Barbara Havers was a detective sergeant attached to a homicide squad. She’d never met a detective before.
She said, “Homicide. Goodness. Did . . . This is terribly odd of me to ask, but why is it that Clare gave you her card?”
Barbara Havers pointed to her tee-shirt and said, “Told her I’d fetch her one from Camden Lock Market and post it along. She said she wanted to wear it next time she saw her doctor.”
“That sounds exactly like her.” Rory extended Clare’s card to the detective and added, “Then here, please take it because Clare doesn’t give out her business card if she isn’t serious. The better course will be to send the tee-shirt to her Shaftesbury address rather than her London address. She’ll be heading there directly after her tour. If you can wait . . . say, perhaps six weeks?”
“Can do,” Barbara said. “But I c’n also send it along to her publisher if it’s going to cause a problem with her minder.”
“Caroline? Please don’t give that a thought. Clare Abbott really has no minder but Clare Abbott. I’m her editor, by the way. Victoria Statham. Rory, actually. And this is Arlo,” she added as she reestablished the dog on her hip.
“I saw him earlier,” Barbara said. “Bit hot for a vest, isn’t it?” She indicated the canvas jacket on Arlo, green and PAD printed in large white letters on either side of it. “What’s PAD?”
“Psychological Assistance Dog,” Rory said.
The policewoman frowned. “Psychological . . . what?”
“He makes it easier for me to go out in public.” Not wishing to explain further about how essential Arlo was to her, Rory hurried on with, “Now, you will take Clare’s request seriously, won’t you?”
“Will do, of course,” Barbara Havers told her. “I have to say it, though.”
“What’s that?”
“Someone actually liking one of my tee-shirts? It’s more or less a first.”
CAMBERWELL
SOUTH LONDON
India Elliott was finding more of her old self every day. This was the self that had been confident and capable of making friends quickly, the self who also had learned early on and at the knee of her father to “cut your losses when you realise you must.” He’d instructed her carefully on that aspect of life, saying, “There’s no shame in it, my girl. Better to end something than to carry on in a losing situation.”
She hadn’t yet decided if cutting her losses applied to her marriage to Charlie, but she knew it was a possibility. Nat Thompson was part of the reason behind this. While she wasn’t sure if Nat was going to be a fixture in her life, she enjoyed his company. Yet, the very last thing she wanted was to end up yet again the docile and agreeable mate of a man who cared for her.
She was frank about this. As a woman separated but not divorced from her husband, she thought it only fair that Nat knew the truth. So on their third date, she’d explained her situation. They’d gone to Somerset House and wandered through a Matisse exhibition, and afterwards, over a shared slice of chocolate gâteau, she’d told him about Charlie, about Will’s death, and about herself.
She didn’t begin with those topics. She wasn’t the sort to offer mounds of personal information to anyone, a habit also learned at the knee of her father. He called it “holding one’s cards close, India.” He’d always loved gambling metaphors.
So she began with the logical questions about schooling and growing up and work. Ultimately, she asked about marriage. Had Nat ever been married? He wa
s thirty-four, well of the age to have a failed starter marriage behind him. But he said no. “I’ve always been a late bloomer. What about you?”
“Separated from my husband,” she told him. “It was . . . I’ve been through a rather difficult time and so has he. There was a suicide in the family.”
He looked concerned. “I’m sorry to hear that. Not your own immediate family, I hope.”
That seemed to give her entrée to speak about Will and his death. Nat, she discovered, was a man of great sympathy.
After that date, there had been another. On that one, he’d taken her to see his work. He was an expert in the preservation of old buildings, his last completed project a row of almshouses that had been under threat of being torn down. Tucked away in Streatham with the sounds of roadwork rising from a brick wall behind them, they’d been ready for the earthmover when Nat had taken them in hand.
They were London’s history, he explained. “If someone doesn’t take a stand against tearing things down merely because they’re old and in disrepair, we lose part of who we are.” Then he added with an appealing shrug of his shoulders, “Very old-fashioned of me, but there you have it.”
“I don’t find you old-fashioned.”
“I’m glad of that,” he told her.
When he took her home later that evening, he kissed her good night. She’d begun wondering if he was even attracted to her, so the kiss was something of a relief. It lingered and then grew more intimate, and she found that she liked this very much. When they broke off from each other, he said, “I like you a great deal, India.”
“And I like you.”
To which he said, “No. I mean I really like you. As in . . . I don’t know. I’m not very good at this sort of thing. As I said, I’m a late bloomer.” He seemed to read the oh no! in her expression because he hastily added, “Not in that way. It’s just that I’ve never mastered the art of the chat so I guess what I’m saying is that . . .” Even in the faint illumination from the porch light she could see him blushing, “I feel some quite serious desire when I’m around you. I don’t feel it for every woman I meet. Of course that could be because most of the women I meet are wearing twin sets and pearls and carrying large handbags filled with news articles about a building they wish to save. But I don’t think so. It’s just that—”
“Shush,” she said. “I feel the same about you. Please kiss me again.”
He did. Then, as was his way, he left her after making sure she got safely inside and had locked the door behind her. He waited till she came to the window of the sitting room that she used as her surgery. After she waved an all’s-well, he turned and left her.
Less than thirty seconds later, her doorbell rang, so she assumed that he’d returned. She swung the door open with a ready smile. But on her front step was Charlie.
CAMBERWELL
SOUTH LONDON
Charlie knew she thought he was the other bloke ringing the bell. He saw this in her face, which was still aglow from kissing, and she’d believed he’d returned for what logically followed the kissing as the night the day.
He saw her expression immediately alter. She looked at the street—for the other bloke, obviously—then back at him. While her expression asked what on earth he was doing there, her words said something different.
“You look terrible, Charlie.”
That hardly mattered. It was no wonder to him that her first remark would refer to his appearance. He had, after all, just had a very good look at the bugger who’d a moment earlier had his tongue in her mouth, and he wasn’t doing well by comparison.
“You’re planning to sleep with him, aren’t you?” were his first words although he hadn’t intended them to be. They simply slipped from him nearly without his awareness, and he wanted to snatch them back the moment he said them. But since he couldn’t do that, he went on instead. “And it will be normal, won’t it? It’ll be excellent. It will actually be what you’ve—”
“I’m not planning anything, Charlie.”
“You’re thinking about it, more each day. You’re developing a fantasy about what it’s going to be like to be taken instead of having to cajole your partner into it and then having to allow him to suckle in your arms like an infant while you—”
“Don’t do this to yourself. You don’t deserve it.”
That stopped him cold. He said bitterly, “That’s why.”
“What?”
“Why I won’t let you go. You’ve understood me from the first. Even that first day at acupuncture, you knew.”
“You misconstrue. That first day at acupuncture I was no different with you than I am with any first-time patient who’s nervous. How are your headaches?”
“This isn’t about my headaches. They’re there, they’re gone, they’re back again. They don’t make a difference. This makes a difference.” He gestured at the neighbourhood and then at the house. He gazed at her and after a moment he asked, “Who is he? A patient?”
“He’s just someone I met.”
“Where?”
“Charlie . . .”
God, it wasn’t going according to his design at all. He’d meant to come only to make a start with her. But seeing her with him and watching her kiss him and knowing as he himself did the taste of her and the feel of her . . . It had done him in.
“No,” he said. “He wouldn’t be a patient. You’ve gone that route once and you’re no fool. I expect you met him just as you say. A pub? The Internet? Sharing a taxi in the rain?”
“We met on the bus,” she said.
“Which you wouldn’t have done had you not left me because you wouldn’t have been on the bus in the first place, having to trail up to the City from this . . . this neighbourhood. It’s dangerous, India. You shouldn’t be here alone.”
“That’s not at all true. And anyway, it’s what I can afford. I have a surgery here to make extra money at the weekend as well.” She indicated a sign in the sitting room’s bay window. Acupuncture, it announced, along with the hours on Saturdays and Sundays when she was available.
He said to her, “Money? I can give you money.”
She looked at him, said, “Charlie, please don’t” because she knew there was no money that, at this point, did not come to him via his mother.
“Are you going to let me in?” he said.
He saw her swallow and imagined he heard it as well. She said, “There isn’t any point. This thing . . . with Nat . . .”
“That’s his name, then. Nat. What sort of name is Nat? Is he a bug or something? Why not Midge or Fly or Mosquito? Any of those would suit, wouldn’t they?”
He saw that she was allowing this ridiculous line of interrogation because she could see how upset he was and, India being India, she felt sorry for that. But he reckoned she was also probably relieved that, at least, he’d got himself out of the flat in Spitalfields. But this visit of his, coming so hard on the heels of his mother’s turning up at the Wren Clinic for that “word” she wished to have with India, was going to tell her more than he wished her to know.
And so it did. India ignored the nonsense questions about Nat and said to him, “What did your mum say to you this time? What did she threaten?”
“She wants me happy. She’s terrified. Who wouldn’t be? In her position. After Will.”
“You aren’t Will. You never were. But you must pull yourself through this. You won’t survive if you don’t.”
“I won’t survive without you.”
“You of all people know how stupid a thing that is to say,” she told him.
Unthinking, he reached for a sprig of holly that grew from an urn to the right of the doorstep. He jerked on it to break it from the plant, only to wince when the sharp point of one of the leaves pierced his thumb. India was watching, but she didn’t intervene to stop him from jerking on yet another sprig and meeting the same res
ult.
He looked bleakly away from her, towards the street. No one was there. No one would see if he forced his way into her house and . . . did what? he wondered. Had his way with her like some Dark Ages lord and master who owned her body but wanted her soul as well? He said to the street and not to her, “We’re meant to be together, India.”
“No one is ‘meant’ to be together.”
“Which goes for you and the midge. The mosquito. The gnat. All right, then. Nat.”
“I don’t disagree.”
He turned back to her. “Are you promising you won’t . . . ? Saying that you won’t . . . ? Saying that this whatever-it-is between you and him isn’t going to end up in something more than what it is now?”
“I’m not saying that. And you must leave.” She took a step back, and he knew she was going to close the door.
He made a move to stop her, his hand on the red surface of the smoothly painted wood. “I want to come in. I want to see where you live. I want to understand why you left and why you’re here and why you want to stay here.”
“You know all of that already. This is how it must be just now. You’re worried and frightened and you’re thinking that if you do something—the right thing—we can go back to being what we were. But we can’t. Too much has happened. We can only go on and what we must wait to see is whether we’re meant to go on separately or together.”
He felt as if the house tilted towards him, and he wanted to push back to keep it upright. The need to act was upon him. It felt as compelling as the struggle for air when a man knows he’s drowning. He said, “I want it to be together. I’ll do anything to make it together. Anything.”
She looked at him with the sort of compassion that declared a seismic shift in their love that could not be repaired. She said, “I know you’ll do anything, Charlie. But don’t you see? That’s just the problem.”
SPITALFIELDS
LONDON
“Tell me honestly,” Rory Statham asked. “Have you ever actually cooked a meal in this kitchen?” She and Clare Abbott were engaged in a postmortem of the evening’s proceedings. They were at a recycled metal-topped table in the basement of Clare’s ancient house in Elder Street. With Caroline Goldacre, they’d been picking through a typical Clare Abbott meal, whose remains were spread out before them in containers, bags, bowls, boxes, and waxed wrapping paper: cheeses, grapes, savoury biscuits, olives, nuts, sliced peaches, a baguette, and a thoroughly hacked-at salami. Caroline had left the kitchen in order to stagger off to bed, but they had remained. Now they were finishing a second bottle of wine, alone in the room save for Arlo, who was snoozing on the floor with his mop-like head resting on Rory’s foot.
A Banquet of Consequences Page 10
