by Alice Castle
But, inexorably, Nina came to a halt outside a house with a steep flight of steps in front and, sensing Beth’s hesitation, looked questioningly at her. ‘What’s up?’
‘It’s just that I know someone who lives here. If it’s still the same lady…’
‘You know my childminder? It’s a small world, innit?’ chuckled Nina, unfazed.
And why should she even have an inkling of Beth’s distress? The events that had brought Beth to this house had been done and dusted, thank heavens, for months now. That didn’t mean that she was any keener to reopen old wounds. Just seeing her face was bound to be upsetting, and she hated to be the cause of pain. But it was too late now. Nina had shed her bags at the bottom of the flight and had nipped up, surprisingly fleet of foot when not impeded by what looked like a week’s shopping, and the door swung open more or less straight away. Beth stood at the bottom of the steps, staring wordlessly upwards.
Jo Osborne, a smile of welcome dying on her lips like a spring bud blasted by frost, didn’t quite take a step back in horror, but she did falter the moment she looked past Nina, down to the small figure on the street.
‘Hi, Jo, how are you doing?’ said Beth nervously.
‘It’s you, Beth.’
To Beth’s huge relief, Jo’s face cleared. She’d been placed, and not blamed. ‘Come up, come up,’ she said, gesturing to both Beth and Ben, who’d been watching the antics of the grown-ups from a safe distance. It wasn’t the enthusiasm of someone greeting a long-lost friend, that was for sure, but neither was it the repulsion or anger that Beth realised would have been more than understandable.
As Beth climbed the steps, toting the discarded shopping bags, Jo turned to Nina, whose eyebrows were now raised into perfect arches. ‘Beth was the one who found my Simone, my daughter. How’ve you been, Beth?’
In the streetlight, Beth saw the sudden shine of Jo’s eyes.
‘Fine, fine,’ said Beth, guilty that her life had taken an upward turn while Jo must have struggled to put one foot in front of the other. ‘I’m sorry if seeing me brings it all back.’
‘Don’t be silly. Never goes away, does it? But I’m keeping on, as you see. Childminding now, so I get more time at home with him,’ she said, gesturing behind her to where her young son peeped out from the kitchen, with Nina’s Wilf.
‘Orlright there, Wilfy? Let’s get going then, hon. Get home for our tea,’ said Nina, and Wilf bounded towards them.
On an impulse, Beth reached over and hugged Jo, the woman’s tense frame melting a little just as they broke off the contact. ‘See you soon,’ she said, though in truth she’d be lying if she pretended she’d seek her out. Even if Jo could never forget, it must make it harder for her to see someone who’d been through those hours and days with her. Beth remembered the time she’d spent sitting in the hospital, holding Simone Osborne’s hand, and hoping against hope that the girl’s eyelids would flutter and she’d come back to life. Sometimes dreams did not come true.
‘You ok?’ said Nina, looking at Beth shrewdly as they walked on.
Beth, now swinging one of the well-stuffed shopping bags, while Nina had the other, just nodded. She didn’t want to have to go through the whole story with Nina. It didn’t feel fair. If Jo wanted to tell her, she’d have ample opportunity when she saw Nina at drop-off and pick-up times.
Wilf, liberated from the small flat where he’d spent a happy but contained few hours, now bounded around in a style which left even Ben looking sedate. Beth suppressed a small smile. She was so used to Ben having enough energy to supply the National Grid. But, she supposed, the time would soon be coming when she’d have to pitchfork him out of bed in the mornings, instead of the current situation, when she’d stagger downstairs only to find that he was already soaking up illicit hours on his PlayStation. But no matter how early he was up, they were still never ready to leave for school on time.
Once they’d left Jo’s, it was only a five-minute walk to Nina’s place – a maisonette with a balcony that seemed to be as bursting with good things as Nina’s habitual shopping bags. Though they’d only been there a matter of months, Nina had made the place very homely, with wide, pale, squashy sofas and the biggest telly that Beth had ever seen. It took up almost a whole wall of the sitting room, standing on spindly legs that seemed hardly strong enough to support such a weight. There were toys everywhere, and a large shaggy rug in the middle of the room, with a ginger cat sitting dead centre who was almost as big as Nina, let alone Wilf.
‘What’s his name?’ said Beth, meeting the unblinking amber stare of the cat, who seemed to swivel his head to watch her as she followed Nina into the tiny kitchen.
‘Oh, that’s Tom. Not very original but I wore myself out thinking of Wilf,’ said Nina. She flipped the switch on the kettle and rooted around in the sink for mugs, which she rinsed quickly and gave a perfunctory swipe with a tea towel dangling from the draining board.
Beth, who knew she was far too much of a stickler in these matters, willed herself to rise above minding, but when the cup of tea was passed to her, she was relieved to see it was as clean and dry as though it had been given a much more thorough going-over. Nina might seem slapdash, but she was surprisingly efficient.
Beth took a cautious sip. Ouch. She set the cup down on the little table, just the right size for Nina and Wilf but which was going to be a squeeze for the four of them. ‘Shall I give you a hand with the cooking? Help put stuff away?’
She watched as Nina stowed the shopping in a way that looked haphazard to her, but which no doubt involved a method too obscure for her to detect.
‘Nah, you’re all right. You just sit there. I’ll just shove this lot in the oven.’ Nina took a large red plastic pouch out of the freezer, ripped the corner off with her teeth, and shook a sunny yellow cascade of oven chips onto a baking tray. Next, a box was hacked apart with the bread knife, and four dark oblongs, like old-fashioned brown paper parcels, thudded onto the tray. Nina poked everything around with a finger until it was arranged to her total satisfaction, then slammed the oven door. She turned to Beth, every bit as smug as Nigella Lawson after knocking up passionfruit soufflé.
‘Hey presto, we’re done. Now, tell me all about life here. Why’s that Belinda MacKenzie got such a massive stick up her arse, for example?’
Beth nearly choked on her tea, which had now reached the perfect temperature. Not for the first time, she wondered why tea couldn’t be made at this point; why one had to wait so long for it to reach this ideal state, which was perilously easy to miss if you weren’t concentrating. But maybe that was the joy of tea drinking – there was a skill to it.
‘Belinda, well, what can I say? I’m not sure anyone can do her justice. Or understand what drives her. Really, she should be running a small country, not harassing her family and the rest of Dulwich.’
Nina laughed. ‘Why doesn’t she just go back to work, then? Give everyone a break?’
‘She’s always trying to prove something, being the best mum, the best hostess, whatever. There can only be one winner; she has to make sure it’s her and no-one else. Maybe she’s scared to go back to work?’
‘Scared? Scary, yes, for sure, but I can’t see her being frightened of anything.’
‘Well, she’s been out of the workplace for years. Her eldest is thirteen. Things must have really moved on. The people she was working with when she first went on maternity leave must all be the big bosses now, so she would lose a lot of status if she went back. No-one would take her on at the level she should be at after such a long break, so she’d be right back where she started, and I don’t suppose it would suit her to be rushing around getting other people cups of tea.’
‘Ha! I’d pay good money to see that. And I bet that poor bleedin’ waiter from the other day would as well,’ said Nina, passing Beth a fistful of cutlery and plonking glasses down on the little table. ‘I bet it wouldn’t take her long to claw her way up again.’
‘Well, that’s true.’ Beth
started arranging knives and forks, making the conjunctions tighter and tighter until they all fit in. ‘But maybe she’s too chicken to try. I know I was actually terrified when I started my job. I’d been working from home for years, but that’s different, somehow. You’re less exposed. When you’re in an office, you sort of feel you’re being judged. Or maybe that’s just me?’
Nina snorted. ‘You need to grow a thicker skin, babe. And you’ll be having me feeling sorry for Belinda in a minute. Not sure I’ve got that much love to go round.’ She darted a fond glance at Wilf, who was now showing Ben his extensive collection of knights, in shining armour, on horseback, waving lances and shields and, in one case, duelling with quite a large plastic dragon.
Ben, though officially way too grown-up to show even a modicum of interest in such things, was actually having a whale of a time, playing with physical objects in a way he hadn’t for ages, Beth realised with a shock. So much of his life was online, he scarcely handled a toy these days.
‘Didn’t you feel out of practice when you went back?’ she asked Nina. ‘Not at all? I mean, it’s great to be with our kids, but I did feel that I couldn’t talk about anything except computer games and who said what to whom at break time…’
‘I know what you mean, but in my case, it’s not like I had a choice, did I? It was either get back out there or starve. And talking of starving…’ Nina shot up and opened the oven door. Thick black smoke billowed out, but Nina waved it away. ‘Don’t worry about that, it’s from ages ago, cake mix spilt. I just haven’t got round to cleaning it up. Well, to be honest, I’m not going to. I think it’ll get burned off in time; they’re self-cleaning, ovens, aren’t they?’
Beth looked sceptical. True, she didn’t spend a lot of time with her head in her own oven, that would be much too Silvia Plath for her taste. Usually it would tell you in the instruction manual whether there was one of those clever self-clean linings or not. But in a rented place, would you even get instructions? She couldn’t blame Nina. And there was probably a grain of truth in her theory. After all, once the cake had been thoroughly carbonised, it would just be ash, wouldn’t it, and would stop burning? By the looks of things, though, they were some way off that stage. She got up. ‘I’ll just open a window, shall I?’
Nina, who was busily engaged in wafting a tea towel up and down in the vicinity of the oven, like the sail on a storm-tossed frigate, shook her head. ‘Nah, sit down, babe, it’ll be gone soon, don’t worry.’
Wilf seemed unconcerned and Ben, having glanced up once and looked over to her for reassurance, was happy enough to go back to his dragon, though she noticed he’d pulled his T-shirt up over his nose.
‘I ’spect you’re fretting about vegetables, but don’t worry, I’m doing beans,’ Nina smiled over.
Beth, who hated to admit that this had indeed been on her mind, tried to look airily unconcerned. ‘Oh, I knew you’d be doing something…’
With a flourish, Nina opened a cupboard, got down a can and yanked the ring-pull back, dumped the contents in a bowl, and shoved it in the microwave. Beth smiled and tried to pretend that she had not been thinking of green, runner, or even broad beans. She also tried to imagine what Katie would say.
Was it going to make any difference, in the long term, that Charlie was brought up largely on carefully sourced, free range organic greens, while Wilf’s food, judging by today’s plate, was always fried as deep and crisp and even as St Wenceslas’s snow? There was one obvious difference. Wilf attacked his meal with gusto, while Charlie was often to be seen listlessly pushing mountains of fearfully expensive kale from one side of his plate to the other.
For a second, Beth thought of them as a brontosaurus, chewing slowly and thoughtfully, versus a tyrannosaur, ripping his cod limb from limb, the ketchup on his plate as bright as any small creature’s blood.
Ben, meanwhile, was in total heaven. ‘Can we have this at home, Mum?’ he asked, chewing blissfully.
Beth, who’d been tucking in just as enthusiastically, nodded, her mouth full of delectable batter, and he smiled happily. Who knew fish technology had moved on so far? Though they ate fish fingers by the truckload, Beth hadn’t tried anything that more nearly resembled an actual ocean-going shape. That was because she remembered slabs of frozen fish as horrible, dry, grey things, lurking in the nastier bits of her childhood. Now it was even better than the stuff you got from the fish and chip shop.
Pudding was a choc ice each for the kids, which they ate on the sofa while Wilf took over the monstrous remote – almost as big as the wall of telly itself – and fired up the machine. They were soon splayed in front of a restless parade of cartoons. Again, at home Ben would have turned his nose up at such juvenile pursuits, but here he showed every sign of loving his temporary regression and catching up with old favourites.
Nina, unlike Beth herself, had a dishwasher, and it didn’t take a moment to stack everything and sling the food boxes away – ta-dah, a clean kitchen. With another strong cup of tea in hand, they retired to the table where Nina thoughtfully stirred sugar into hers.
Seeing her plump paw of a hand, bare of nail varnish and rings, jogged something in Beth’s memory.
‘Oh, nearly forgot to say. I saw your boss today.’
Nina stopped stirring. ‘Really? Where?’
‘Your office. I just stopped by in case you were there. Wanted to get the lie of the land, after what you said, you know.’ Beth looked over at the boys, but both seemed absorbed by the flickering images on the screen.
‘Oh, and you met him? Paul Potter? I was out today, mostly. Wanted me to “work from home”, didn’t he?’ Nina gave the phrase heavy air inverted commas. ‘Suspicious in itself, that.’
‘Why? Loads of people do that for a couple of days a week.’ Beth thought guiltily of the hours she herself had clocked up recently, very much not working, but also very much at home.
‘Yeah, fair enough. Just a little problem. See anything missing?’
Beth looked around the small living room again, with its kitchen corner, its comfy seating, and the small table. ‘Looks like you’ve got everything sorted.’
‘Yeah but – no laptop? And you’ve seen my phone. Unless I had a quill pen here and a stack of parchment, not much I could be doing in terms of work.’
Beth laughed. ‘But that’s crazy! Does he know you don’t have a PC here?’
‘I told him at the interview. And he’s seen my phone. Telly’s the only bit of tech we’ve got, and I let Wilf talk me into that. Hardly know how to turn it on, myself. But still Potter insists, every now and then, that I bugger off out of the office and “work from home”. I reckon it’s just an excuse to get me out of the way.’
‘And I don’t suppose you’re going to turn him down, are you?’ Beth was thoughtful, then saw Nina give her a sharp glance. ‘Oh, I don’t mean anything by that. I’d be exactly the same,’ she added, thinking Nina didn’t know the half of it. Beth might be many things, but a shining example of the Stakhanovite work ethic, she most definitely wasn’t.
‘So, what did you make of him?’
Beth thought for a moment. She couldn’t say exactly why, but she hadn’t warmed to Paul Potter. The obvious signs of wealth in the tan, watch, and vowels, were always going to wind up someone like her, who’d been born in easy circumstances, but who had always had to work hard to stay in the middle. There was the on-off charm, which had been abandoned when it was clear that she wasn’t a potential client. And then there was just an indefinable sense that something was out of kilter, either about Potter himself or the set-up he presided over. But would she have felt that if she’d just wandered innocently in off the street, or was she being unduly influenced by Nina’s suspicions?
‘I can’t really say why, but I didn’t take to him.’
‘Nah. He’s a tosser.’
Nina was nothing if not succinct, thought Beth, darting a glance over to Ben, but he was as absorbed as ever. On the screen, a five-foot SpongeBob SquarePants was
doing some sort of dance, his radioactive yellow colouring not a million miles from the chips they had just consumed.
‘Are you any further on, working out what seems to be wrong?’
‘Nah.’ Nina stirred her tea thoughtfully. ‘Been thinking about it, and it’s got to be some sort of scam. He’s just back from a week in Dubai with the missus, and she’s quite the shopper. The whole thing must have set him back a fortune. They stayed in some swanky hotel that’s in the shape of a pineapple or something, ten billion storeys and gold taps everywhere you look. He left the window open on his computer. Yeah, I don’t love the tech, but I can work it when I have to.’ Nina raised her eyebrows.
‘Well, I suppose everyone’s entitled to a holiday,’ said Beth.
‘Yeah, but where’s the money coming from? We’re not doing that well. There hasn’t been a juicy divorce in Dulwich since Dr Grover got shot of whatsername, that one from Holby. Potter handled that. Before my time, but I looked at the file. Even that wasn’t hammer and tongs like you’d want. All nicey-nice and wishing each other the best. No wills coming in, neither. We need a really good cold snap, like this but worse, get the oldies dropping off their perches,’ said Nina thoughtfully.
Beth, a little taken aback at this gruesome thought, had a brainwave. ‘Maybe he was just using savings for the holiday? Or maybe his wife’s rich?’
‘Savings? I don’t think so. We’re dodging the bills most days. And Letty? Well, you’d know better than me.’
Beth thought for a moment. She’d only ever seen Letty Potter with Belinda. And the trouble was that Belinda dominated everything. Not just the conversation and the space, but also the view. She was centre-stage, glossy, and beautifully packaged, her face just a little blander and less mobile than you might expect for someone her age. It was hard to focus on her friends. They were Michelles, compared to Belinda’s triumphant Beyoncé. But wait a minute, was Letty the Kelly of the group? Someone who, with her silvery hair and wafty clothes, had enough personality to stand out from the also-rans in Dulwich’s answer to Destiny’s Child? Well, maybe – but not enough for Beth to remember anything salient about her background.
