Beneath the Skin

by Nicci French

  I heard Clive come in. I must go and say good night to Chris, make sure he's properly settled before everyone arrives. Had I remembered to put the chocolates on the sideboard?

  Chris was sunburned and fretful. I left him listening to a Roald Dahl tape with the night-light on, and prayed he wouldn't make a fuss during the meal. Clive was in the shower. Downstairs I put a voluminous apron over my glad rags, and spooned the wild mushrooms over the canapés, shredded lettuce into the salad bowl: just a green salad with the fish. Elegance lies in simplicity. The sky outside the kitchen window was the color of raspberries. Red sky at night, shepherd's delight. Josh and Harry would be at their camp by now, American time.

  “Hello,” said Clive. He looked bronzed and gleaming in his suit; there was a sheen of success about him.

  “You look smart. But I haven't seen that tie before,” I said. I wanted him to tell me how chic I looked tonight.

  He fingered the knot of the tie.

  “No, it's new.”

  The doorbell rang.

  Neither Sebastian nor his wife, Gloria, was the least bit like I had expected. Sebastian was tall, with a startlingly bald head. He would have been rather distinguished-looking in a sinister, Hollywood way if he hadn't been so obviously on edge. There was a faint air of contempt in Clive's manner toward him, a touch of the bully. With a sudden flash of intuition, I realized that Clive was going to shaft Sebastian in his wretched takeover bid, and this dinner party was a cruel charade of friendliness. Gloria, the City headhunter, was much younger than her husband—in her late twenties, I would have guessed. And her blond, almost silver hair didn't come from a bottle after all. She had pale blue eyes, brown slim arms, neat ankles with a thin silver chain around one of them, and she wore a perfectly simple white linen shift and very little makeup. She made me feel overdressed; she made Emma look blowsy.

  All three men were attentive to her, turning their bodies subtly toward her as we stood on the half-built patio and drank champagne. She knew how pretty she was too. She kept lowering her lashes and giving secretive smiles. Her laugh was a little silvery peal, like a delicate bell.

  “Nice tie,” she said to Clive, giving him that smile. It made me want to spill wine on her dress.

  They had obviously met before; well, I suppose they would have, given their jobs. She and Sebastian and Clive and Jonathan stood in a group and talked about the Footsie and the futures market, while Emma and I stood by like gooseberries.

  “I always think the Footsie index is such a comical name,” I said loudly, determined not to be ignored.

  Gloria turned politely toward me.

  “Do you work in the City too?” she asked, although I knew she knew I didn't.

  “Me? Goodness, no.” I laughed loudly and took a gulp of champagne. “I can't even add up my bridge hand. No, Clive and I decided that when we had children I would stop working outside the home. Do you have children?”

  “No. What did you do before?”

  “I was a model.”

  “A hand model,” said Emma. My friend, Emma.

  “They are nice hands,” said Sebastian, rather stiffly.

  I waved them in front of everyone. “These were my fortune,” I said. “I used to wear gloves all the time, even during mealtimes. Sometimes I even wore them in bed. Mad, eh?” Jonathan poured more champagne in our glasses. Gloria was saying something softly to Clive, who was smiling down at her. Upstairs Chris started crying. I poured the champagne down my throat.

  “Excuse me, everybody. Carry on. Duty calls. I'll tell you when dinner's ready. Please have some more canapés.”

  I turned over the tape for Chris and kissed him again, and told him if he called downstairs again I'd be annoyed. Then I went into our room. I put on more lipstick and brushed my hair and splashed perfume down my cleavage. I felt the teeniest bit tipsy. I wanted to be lying in bed, between clean, ironed sheets. Alone, thank you very much.

  I drank fizzy water with the soup, but then I had some lovely Chardonnay with the fish, a glass of claret with the Brie, a rather nice dessert wine with the apricot pudding, and the coffee was like a little jolt of clarity in between the alcohol fuzz.

  “What a manipulative girl,” I said to Clive, afterward, when I was wiping off my makeup with a cotton pad and he was cleaning his teeth.

  He rinsed his mouth carefully. He looked at me, with my one eye on and one eye off. “You're drunk,” he said.

  I had a sudden, utterly disconcerting fantasy of slapping him, plunging my nail scissors into his stomach. “Nonsense.” I laughed. “I'm just tipsy, darling. I think it all went quite well, don't you?”

  SEVEN

  My big vice is catalogs, mail order. That's mad in a way because it's not me at all. If there's one thing I believe in it's that the objects in your home have to be exactly right. The thought of having the second-best object, that you chose because it was a little bit—or a lot—cheaper, and having it squatting there in the corner of the room year after year, accusing you, well, that's my idea of torture. You need to touch things before you buy them, walk around them, get a feeling of how they would look in the particular space you've envisaged.

  So I shouldn't bother with catalogs. The towels that look fluffy in the picture may feel synthetic when they arrive and be just a different enough shade to clash with the wooden frame of the wonderful mirror you found in that market last summer. The salad spoons may look heavy but feel tackily light when they arrive. And I know that theoretically you can return them and get your money back, but somehow you never get around to that. It's indefensible and Clive is pretty contemptuous of it, if he happens to notice it, but then he's got his wretched wine catalogs, which he pores over late into the night.

  So when catalogs arrive I can't resist flicking through them, and there'll always be something that catches my eye: trainers or a baseball jacket for the boys, or a clever pencil holder or a slotted spoon or an amusing alarm clock or a wastepaper basket that might look good up in the den. As often as not they'll end up stuffed in the loft or the back of a cupboard, but sometimes they'll turn up trumps. In any case, it's such fun when they arrive, brought by special delivery that you have to sign for. It's like an extra birthday. Better in some ways. If I were being sarcastic, I might say that while boys—and certain men who shall remain nameless—might forget a birthday, at least overnight delivery doesn't fail to deliver the lampshade you ordered, even if you don't care for it quite as much as you expected to.

  Slightly naughtily, these mail-order companies then pass your name on to other companies, especially when their computers have probably cottoned on to the fact that you're pathetically likely to buy things you don't really need. It's a bit like being the most popular girl in the school. Everybody wants to be your friend and you don't always want to be theirs. I mean honestly, sometimes I get advertisements from the most extraordinary people. Just last week I got a brochure from a company that makes ponchos out of llama hair. Twenty-nine pounds ninety-nine, and you could get two for thirty-nine ninety-nine, as if anybody who wasn't living in the Andes would even want one. I didn't consider it for a second.

  All of which is a prelude to what happened on the Monday when I came downstairs in the middle of the morning and saw the normal dross on the mat. Not real mail, of course. Just the usual bunch of silly colored flyers offering to deliver pizza with a free Coke and clean our windows and give a valuation for a house and pull out our original window frames and replace them with metal and double glazing. And among them was one that said “Special Offer Victorian Interiors.” So I opened it.

  I bet you don't know how you open a letter. You do it every day but you never think about it. I know because I've been forced to dwell on it. You pick up the letter, turn the front of it, the address side, away from you. If it's stuck firmly down, you pry away one corner of the stuck-down flap and tear it slightly. The point is to make space so you can insert your second finger and push it along the fold, tearing it all the way along. That's what I did a
nd the curious thing was that I didn't feel any pain. I opened the envelope and saw a dull glitter of metal and that the envelope seemed to be wet in places, wet and spotted with red.

  It was only then that I felt not pain exactly but a dull ache in my left hand. I looked down and it took a strangely long time for me to take in what I was seeing. There seemed to be blood everywhere, splashes across my fawn trousers, drip-dripping on the floor; my fingers were wet with it. I still didn't properly understand, so I looked stupidly into the envelope as if it might have been spilling warm red paint onto the floor. I saw the dull metal. Flat pieces stapled in a line along a piece of card. I didn't see at first what they were and then suddenly I thought of my father, sitting on the edge of the bath when I was a little girl watching him with white foam on his face like Father Christmas. Old-fashioned razor blades.

  I looked at my fingers. A steady stream of blood was trickling down onto the bare board. I lifted up my hand and inspected it. There was a deep livid cut in the second finger. I could feel it pulsing, oozing out blood. That was when it began to hurt and I felt dizzy and cold and hot all at once. I didn't scream or cry. I wasn't sick. Instead my legs gave way and I slipped down onto the blood and half-lay there. I don't know how long I was like that. Just a few minutes, probably, before Lena came down and ran to get help, and Lynne appeared with her mouth in the shape of a perfect O.

  She is wearing cream slacks and a maroon shirt. Her hand is bandaged, and every so often she holds it in her healthy hand, carefully, as if it was a wounded bird. Her hair is pushed behind her ears in a way that makes her face look even thinner, her cheekbones more gaunt. She looks older already. I am putting on the years.

  No earrings today. No perfume. Reddish lipstick that makes her face look pallid. Powder too thickly applied, so I can see specks of it on her cheek, her forehead. She walks as if she is in a dream, her feet scuffling the floor. Her shoulders are slumped. Every so often she frowns, as if she is trying to remember something. She puts her hand against her heart. She wants to feel her life beating against her palm. The other one did that too.

  She was so carefully held together and now she is coming apart. Bit by bit, the shell is cracking open. I can see her. The bits of her that she never wanted to show anybody. Fear turns people inside out.

  Sometimes I want to laugh. It has turned out so well. This can be my whole life. This is what I have been waiting for.

  EIGHT

  “Does it hurt?”

  Detective Chief Inspector Links leaned toward me. Too close. But at the same time he seemed far away.

  “They gave me pills for that.”

  “Good. We need to ask you some questions.”

  “Oh, for goodness' sake.”

  The police have been good for some things. They can get you to the front of the queue in the casualty department and they give you a lift to the hospital and back and make you tea. It's the other stuff that's been a problem.

  “I know it's a difficult time. We need your help.”

  “Why? I've had enough of your questions. It seems simple enough to me. There's a man out there who seems to keep coming to the house. So can't you just arrest him while he's posting envelopes through the door?”

  “It's not that easy.”

  “Why not?”

  Links took a deep breath.

  “If someone really sets his mind on doing something, then—” He stopped abruptly.

  “Then what?”

  “We want to go through some names.”

  “Go on, then. Do you want a cup of tea? It's in the pot.”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Do you mind if I have one?” I poured myself a cup, but then, somehow, I put the teapot down on a plate and very slowly it toppled and crashed to the quarry-tile floor, shattering. Boiling tea splashed everywhere.

  “Sorry. It must be my hand. How clumsy.”

  “Let me help.” Links started picking up broken pieces of china. Lynne mopped the floor, making herself useful for a change. Then we sat down again at the kitchen table. Lynne passed a file over to Links, who opened it up. There was a list of names, with photographs attached. There were teachers, a gardener, a real estate agent, an architect, all sorts; suits, T-shirts, clean-shaven, stubble. The pain or the pills or the shock had made me feel slow and dreamy. It seemed almost funny to be looking at this list of drab people I'd never met.

  “Who are they? Criminals?”

  Links looked uncomfortable.

  “I can't tell you everything,” he said. “For legal reasons. But what I can say is that we're trying to establish any possible connections there may be between you and, er . . .” He seemed to be searching for the right word. “Areas where similar problems have been reported. Anything here that rang any kind of bell could be useful. However remote. I mean, this estate agent, Guy Brand. To take just one example. I'm not suggesting anything, but an estate agent has access to many properties. And you have recently moved house after looking in many areas of London.”

  “Yes, I met hundreds of estate agents. But I've got the most dreadful memory for faces. Why don't you ask him?”

  “We have,” said Links. “They couldn't find you on their books. But their record-keeping seemed to be pretty haphazard.”

  I looked again.

  “He might be familiar. But then estate agents have a sort of look in common, don't they?”

  “So you might have met him?”

  “I don't know about that,” I said. “I just mean that if you proved that I had met him, then I wouldn't think it was impossible.”

  Links didn't look very satisfied with that answer.

  “I can leave these pictures with you, if you like.”

  I shrugged.

  “Why would he do this?” I asked. “Go to all this trouble for something so nasty?”

  Links caught my eye and for the first time he looked distressed and unable to conceal it.

  “I don't know.”

  “Well, I hardly need reminding of that, do I?” I responded tartly. At this very moment there were about eight of them, crawling round the house like ants, taking things away in small boxes and plastic bags, muttering to each other in corners, looking at me as if I were a wounded animal. I couldn't go anywhere without bumping into them. They were very polite, in their way, but still there was practically nowhere I could go to be on my own. I raised my voice. “What I want to know is what your lot are doing while I'm working away, racking my brains to help you?”

  “I can assure you that we are all working hard too,” he replied. Actually, he did look a bit weary, now I came to think about it.

  As I went upstairs I passed an officer coming down with a stack of papers. I went into the bathroom and locked the door, leaning on it for a moment. I splashed cold water on my face with one hand. Blood was starting to seep through the muslin wrapped around the other. Afterward I sat at my dressing table and applied more makeup with my inept left hand. I was looking a bit ragged, what with one thing and another. My hair could do with washing. In this heat you almost need to wash your hair every day. I rubbed cream into the smudges below my eyes and put on some lip gloss. I had to admit that this was getting me down. I wished Clive would ring back so I could speak to someone who wasn't a policeman. I had already told him about my hand and he had been very shocked and insisted on talking to Stadler on the phone, barking questions at him, but he hadn't come rushing back, as I had hoped, bearing flowers.

  Then Detective Inspector Stadler wanted to talk to me about the details of my daily life. We had to retreat into the sitting room because Mary wanted to wash the kitchen floor.

  “How's your hand, Mrs. Hintlesham?” he asked in that soft, deep, insistent voice of his.

  On this hot day he had taken his jacket off and his shirtsleeves were rolled up to just below the elbows. There were beads of sweat on his forehead. When he asked me questions, he always looked me directly in the eyes, which gave me the feeling that he was trying to catch me out.

&n
bsp; “Fine,” I replied, which wasn't exactly true. It stung. Razor cuts are always horrible, that's what the doctor had said when she strapped it up.

  “This person,” he said. “Obviously knows that you used to be a hand model.”

  “Maybe.”

  He picked up two books, and I saw for the first time that they were my appointment book and my address book.

  “Can we go through some things?”

  I sighed. “If we have to. As I told that senior officer of yours, I'm very busy.”

  He looked evenly at me in a way that made me flush.

  “This is for your benefit, you know, Mrs. Hintlesham.”

  And so I watched my life passing before my eyes. We started with my appointment book. He leafed through each page and fired questions at me about names, places, appointments.

  That was my hairdresser, I said, and that was a checkup with the dentist for Harry. That was lunch with Laura, Laura Offen. I spelled out initials, described shops, explained arrangements with handymen and French tutors and tennis coaches, lunches, coffee mornings, reminders. We went farther and farther back, through events I had forgotten, couldn't even remember when he reminded me of them: all the negotiations for the house, the real estate agents and surveyors and the tree surgeons and planners. The school year. My social life. All the details of my days. He kept asking where was Clive when this happened, when that happened.

  Finally we got back to New Year's Day and Stadler closed the date book and picked up my address book. We went through every blessed name. I took Stadler through the old neglected dusty attic of my social life. So many who had moved away or died. Couples who had separated. And those friends I had just lost touch with—or who had lost touch with me. It made me think about how much of a social asset I'd been over the last few years. Could this person really be one of those names?