by Rebecca Reid
After three days, she wasn’t worried so much as angry.
Her texts weren’t being read. His phone was going straight to voicemail. Was he trying to play her at her own game? Had he rented a car and taken off somewhere? Would he feel that he was entitled to kiss other women? Sleep with them even?
So, when the police arrived, three days after she and the children had left France, with am-dram sad faces and soft voices, she assumed it must be her parents. Or his parents. Or someone else. Anyone. But not Jim.
How could anything have happened to Jim?
He had shot himself, they said.
The world went silent after she heard the words. Completely, utterly silent. She couldn’t remember what people were supposed to do with their arms or their hands. She stood, swirling in a completely silent vortex, waiting for someone to tell her that it was a mistake, that they had the wrong person, that her husband was coming home.
But they didn’t say that. Instead they told her that he had found a hunting rifle in the shed, and shot himself in the head. Caroline tried desperately not to imagine the peeling whitewashed walls of the cottage covered with his brains: every feeling and memory and experience they’d ever had together, splattered over the wall of the first house that they had ever holidayed in.
She had offered the police officers a cup of tea because that was what people did. Her hands shook as she made them. One mug came out too light, the other too dark. She handed them over, apologetic for the quality. They must get served terrible tea all of the time, she thought. Did the same police officers do all of the bad news delivering? Or was it a shift thing? Did they get training for this? Did they have to download a seminar about how to do that special sing-song voice?
‘He left a note,’ one of them said eventually. She was stony-faced as she uttered the words. Caroline couldn’t help thinking: The worst is yet to come.
‘The French police faxed it over. Would you like to see it?’
She nodded, and then shook her head. ‘Could you leave it over there?’ she asked, as though it was a delivery. ‘On the table.’
The woman police officer, dark and pretty, put it down. ‘Is there anyone here with you?’
‘My children,’ she said. ‘And the nanny.’
Nanny was the wrong word for what Poppy had become, really. More of a friend. Doing everything that Caroline couldn’t face doing, reassuring her whenever she wobbled about what they had done to Jim. How was she going to take this untakeable news?
Eventually, once they were sure that Caroline wasn’t going to slit her own wrists or run screaming into the street, the police left. They shoved all sorts of papers and leaflets into her hands, saying things about undertakers and funerals and repatriating the body. Jim had always been a stickler for getting the most expensive travel insurance. Though did it still pay out if you killed yourself? she wondered.
She waved the police off, smiling in the door frame so that everyone on the square could see that she hadn’t been arrested. Then she went back into the living room, the room where Jim had pulled the carpets up himself when they had first moved in to satiate her desire for wooden floorboards, the room where they had first lain Jack in his crib when they brought him home from hospital. These walls had held Christmases and birthdays and arguments and tantrums. Games of Twister. Sick children lying on the sofa watching the TV.
She picked up the piece of paper from the table, her head crushingly tight, and took a long, slow breath. Was there anything that he could have written here that would make this unfathomable choice any better? She flipped it over. This was what she was going to have to cling to when she told her children that their father was dead, when she lay awake alone at night, wondering whether what she had done was the reason that this had happened.
She looked down. His writing as familiar to her as her own.
‘She kissed me. I said no.’
CHAPTER 39
The flatness of the week following the party had come as no surprise. She’d seen it lots of times with the Hendersons. Beautiful, exciting weekends evaporated into nothing and left the same routine that had sat there before. The week dragged, full of tidying and organizing and finding things in completely the wrong place and wondering how they could have got there. And without Gina the house felt cold again.
She had thought that by painting it and decorating it, by waxing and sanding and varnishing it, she would stamp her name all over it, beat the place into submission. It hadn’t worked. It was still too big. Aggressively quiet. And any creak from upstairs or door blown shut sent a pole of fear through her body. On the upside, the photo shoot had provided some distraction. Someone from the office of Your Country House magazine had called on Monday and requested to visit on Thursday – today. Apt, given the name of the house. The very grand voice on the end of the phone had pointed that out and Poppy had laughed dutifully. They were sending a reporter, a photographer and a stylist, apparently. She was surprised that they had the money to hire so many people for one feature. But then maybe looking inside other people’s houses was the sort of thing people would still buy a magazine for.
She was grateful for the distraction of the photo shoot. But even the prospect of ordering flowers and fiddling with every frame and ornament in the house hadn’t made her happy. The regret about how things were with Gina had lain cold and heavy in the bottom of her stomach. Could she call her? Probably not. For the thousandth time she wished there were more people to call. No. That was a lie. She wished she could call Caroline.
All Poppy had to do was close her eyes and she was back in the Walkers’ kitchen. High ceiling, yellow cabinets, drawings and letters from school on the fridge. Mismatched plates, music on the radio, a larder full of brightly coloured snacks and treats that all the other children at their chi-chi north London schools were forbidden. But those kids were so active, so fast, so everywhere all the time that it didn’t matter how much sugar they scoffed, it was burned up immediately. Poppy remembered the warmth of their skinny little limbs, wrapped in a towel after a bath. The weight of a child on her lap, begging for a story.
She shut the memories down, like turning off the TV. The sounds and colours and smells disappeared. She was good at that. It had taken a long time, but she could put steel shutters around every single moment of that life and forbid it to seep into the rest of her mind.
The kettle. That was what she’d do. She’d boil the Aga kettle, which took three times as long as the electric one, but looked better. And get all the teacups out. That way, when they arrived she would have something to do, something to busy herself with. Would they be able to tell when they looked at her that she wasn’t the sort of person who owned a house like this?
She shouldn’t have worried. Paul, the artistic director who arrived half an hour later, was definitely not that ‘type’. He fell through the front door saying, ‘So lovely to meet you, darling, where the fuck’s the toilet? I’m dying for a slash.’ He ran inside, shouting instructions to his assistant Pippa. They followed behind him, carrying suitcases and lights and talking incessantly. Their noise made Poppy realize how right Drew was, how this house went dead when it was empty but came to life when it was full of voices. When they started a family, it would be like this all the time. She would meet people with children, and they’d have parties here, and it would be full of noise and life.
‘Where shall I set up hair and make-up?’ asked a blonde woman with deep creases in her tanned skin. ‘Somewhere with natural light is best.’
‘Make-up?’ asked Poppy.
‘Yeah, make-up,’ she repeated. ‘You’re Poppy Spencer, right?’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but I thought it was just the house?’
The woman looked down at a piece of paper and then held it out. ‘Poppy Spencer, hair and make-up.’
‘I didn’t realize.’ Was this a bad idea? What if someone saw it? What if someone made the connection, saw her living in the big house with the handsome husband and thought that she did
n’t deserve it? Wanted to make trouble?
‘Didn’t Emma explain?’ said Paul, walking through the hall carrying a crate, as though it was his house rather than hers. ‘We shoot the house; then we do some piccies of you in your favourite room, and ask you some questions. She said she’d talked you through it?’
‘She had, she had,’ Poppy said. Was that true? She couldn’t remember. She’d been drunk on Saturday night when Emma had first suggested it, and then when she had called to discuss it the day before she’d been so distracted, so worried about Gina, that she’d hardly taken any of it in. ‘I’d just sort of spaced. Sorry. If I’d remembered I’d have sorted myself out.’ She gestured at her jeans and jumper apologetically.
‘It’s fine.’ Paul grinned. ‘You look gorge. But if you want to go and change, there’s plenty of time.’
She didn’t really. She didn’t want to put on a dress and stand smugly around the house looking like all of her dreams had come true.
‘I’ll just go and put something else on,’ she heard herself say.
What was she supposed to wear for a photo shoot? She pulled her hands through her wardrobe, as if by looking again she could magically uncover the perfect thing, something which made her look elegant and chic without seeming twee or older than her age. The right dress would be pale pink or pale blue, with cap sleeves and a fitted waist and a little kick to the skirt. She didn’t own anything like that. Eventually she found a pretty green dress, printed with white stars. It had buttons down the front and a collar. She had ordered it online and meant to send it back because it was a little too tight in the arms and gaped a bit over her chest. She slipped it on hopefully and found that it fit. She must have lost weight. She’d been drinking less since Gina left. Much less. And she hadn’t bothered much with food. It seemed so pointless making herself lunch for one.
From upstairs she could hear Paul bellowing orders, telling the crew to move the flowers and open the curtains and shift a table. Maybe you had to be like that if you were going to do his job, to go into other people’s houses and make them look even more beautiful than they really were. Funny, how Paul had taken command of the house. It seemed to be listening to him, offering none of the resistance it did to Poppy. When she went back downstairs, her limbs hastily rubbed with fake tan, feet shoved into a pair of ballet pumps, the rooms seemed to have bent to him immediately, without any of the fight they had given her. If only she were brave enough to ask him how he had done it, perhaps she could have learned the trick.
The photos were painful. Poppy, like almost everyone, hated having her photo taken. The make-up artist had curled her hair and added vast amounts of volume so it was like a sort of auburn halo around her head. She’d painted liner on her lids and covered her mouth with a pink lipstick which managed to make her lips feel both greasy and dry. Something about the lipstick made the back of her throat ache. She stood in front of the kitchen counter, pretending to use her KitchenAid.
‘It’s not a bit Stepford wife, is it?’ she ventured after ten minutes or so.
‘Oh, that’s the idea,’ said the photographer without looking up from the camera. ‘You haven’t got a pair of heels you could pop on, have you?’
‘No,’ Poppy lied. ‘Sorry.’
The next set-up had her sitting at the head of the table in the dining room, hands folded on the table. It must look ridiculous. As the photographer fiddled with the white tent thing, bouncing light all around the room, making no discernible difference, Poppy was struck by the horrible thought that her mother might see this. The chances were slim, admittedly. But what if she had a Google alert on her name? Or what if her sister or her mother stumbled over the magazine in the waiting room at the GP? She could see the tightness of her mother’s lips without even closing her eyes. The little noise she would give, somewhere between a tut and a sigh. A noise which said, ‘How could you show yourself off like that? It’s like you’re asking for trouble.’
Maybe she was. Maybe she had decided that asking for trouble was the only way to get what she deserved.
‘We’ve got the shot,’ called the photographer, as if it was an episode of America’s Next Top Model.
‘Now, we’ll just whisk you away for some questions and then we’ll be all done,’ said Paul in his sing-song voice. Did he always talk like that, Poppy wondered. Or did he get home, peel off his jeans and slump on the sofa, talking four octaves lower?
In the snug she kicked off her pumps and settled on the sofa, legs curled underneath her.
‘So, you did the whole place without a designer?’
‘Yes,’ she said. What was she supposed to say to that? She had chosen the colours and the prints and the textures without paying someone else an enormous amount of money to do so. Was that really so astonishing?
‘I heard you did it in a week?’
Poppy smiled. ‘Most of it, yes.’
‘You and your husband?’
‘Me and a friend. Drew was away for work.’
Paul raised one perfectly threaded eyebrow. ‘He didn’t mind coming home to a completely different house?’
‘He was pleased.’
‘Pleased?’
‘Well, the house was always beautiful but it was quite worn out. Everything we inherited from the previous owners was tasteful and chic, but it had had a lot of use.’
‘Did you know the previous owners?’
The skin on the back of Poppy’s neck tightened. Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid. How could she have stumbled into that so easily? He wasn’t even trying to trip her up, she was managing it all on her own.
‘No,’ she said. ‘They moved abroad.’
‘Nice. Somewhere hot?’
‘Dubai,’ Poppy answered, plucking an answer from the air.
‘How did you choose it?’
‘The house?’ Poppy shifted. ‘It’s quite a romantic story. My husband bought the house for me as a wedding present.’
‘A wedding present?’ Paul seemed charmed. ‘My husband got me a tie. I feel short-changed.’
Poppy laughed, more from the relief of getting away from the previous-owner question than because Paul’s joke was funny. ‘He’s a very special person. I’d never had my own place before. It was amazing to come back here and realize that it was ours, and we could do anything we wanted with it.’
‘Which is your favourite room?’
‘It’s a tie between our bedroom and the kitchen. I love the view from our room, and because it’s all in very soft tones it feels like a really gentle place to be. But the kitchen is what I’d always dreamed of.’
Paul nodded as she spoke. She wasn’t sure whether that meant she was doing a good job, or whether that was just what he did.
‘Anything else planned for the future?’
‘I want to tackle the garden. It’s beautiful, but a bit of a mess. I’d like to have it over two levels, with a sunken garden.’
‘And the house?’
‘The top floor is still pretty spartan. I think it would make a nice nursery – at some point.’
Paul laughed out loud. ‘Oh, you tease! Brilliant. You’re a natural.’
Poppy couldn’t help laughing too. ‘I doubt anyone will care. But I love these kinds of features, nosing around someone else’s house.’
‘You’re going to have a lot of women out there very jealous.’
What was she supposed to say to that? Thank you? Was making other people jealous a good thing? Something she should think of at night to give herself an insulating glow of smugness?
‘Well.’ Paul got to his feet and flicked through his notebook. ‘I think we’ve got everything.’
‘Oh, great. Well, if you need anything else, Emma gave you my number?’
Paul stopped on a page of the notebook. ‘Ah, yes, last thing. Why did you change the name?’
‘The name?’
‘Of the house.’
Poppy looked blank. ‘Sorry?’
‘The records for the house say that it was cal
led Eden Park, but you’re calling it Thursday House. It was changed by a Drew Spencer – that’s your husband, right? I was just wondering whether there was any special significance there?’
Poppy’s throat stuck together as she tried to swallow. He was going to think it was strange that she didn’t know that.
Why didn’t she know that? ‘Oh yes.’ She smiled. ‘Drew, being romantic again. He called the house Thursday House because we met on a Thursday.’
Paul made a high-pitched noise and smiled. ‘They’ll be creaming their pants back at the office when they read that. Sorry,’ he added, mistaking her expression for distaste at his words.
Drew had said that the house didn’t have a name before, when he lived there as a child. He told her he’d christened it Thursday House. Why would he tell her that?
Why would he lie?
BEFORE
Caroline pushed the door to Poppy’s bedroom open and pressed the note into her hand. She was sitting on her bed, painting her toenails a bright coral colour.
‘Read it,’ Caroline said.
She watched Poppy’s face as she went over the words, over and over them, apparently struggling to understand them.
‘He’s dead,’ said Caroline. She would save the kind, gentle words for her children later. There was no point in wasting them now. ‘He killed himself.’
Poppy looked up at her, her eyes enormous.
‘Is it true?’ asked Caroline, pointing at the note. His shaky blue writing on faint-lined paper. ‘“She kissed me.”’
Poppy didn’t answer.
‘Is it true?’ Caroline said again, her voice a whisper-scream. This was not how the children would find out. That much she could control.
‘Yes,’ said Poppy. ‘It’s true.’
Caroline turned away from her. The white wall of the bedroom seemed to sink away from her and then come closer, back and forward. She wanted to be sick. ‘How could you?’ she asked eventually, struggling to form words. ‘How could you do that to him?’
