The One Plus One

by Moyes, Jojo

  ‘No, it’s –’

  She turned over and he saw she was joking. She traced the side of his face. ‘You’re so sweet to me. And it’s a lovely thought. But I don’t have thousands of pounds lying around right now.’

  The words came out of his mouth even before he knew what he was saying. ‘I’ll lend it to you. If it makes you money, you pay me back. If it doesn’t, then it’s my own fault for giving you dud advice.’

  She started laughing and stopped when she realized he wasn’t joking.

  ‘You’d do that for me?’

  Ed shrugged. ‘Honestly? Five grand doesn’t really make a big difference to me right now.’ And I’d pay ten times that if it meant you would leave.

  Her eyes widened. ‘Whoa. That is the sweetest thing anyone’s ever done for me.’

  ‘Oh … I doubt that.’

  Before she left the next morning he wrote her a cheque. She had been tying her hair up in a clip, making faces at herself in his hall mirror. She smelt vaguely of apples. ‘Leave it blank,’ she said, when she realized what he was doing. ‘I’ll get my brother to do it for me. He’s good at all this stocks and shares stuff. What am I buying again?’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘I can’t help it. I can’t think straight when I’m near you.’ She slid her hand down his boxers. ‘I’ll pay you back as soon as possible. I promise.’

  ‘Here.’ Ed reached over for a business card, and took a step backwards. ‘That’s the name of the company. And do this. I promise it’ll help. Can’t have you feeling hemmed in!’

  He smothered the warning voice in his head. His faux cheer bounced off the apartment walls.

  Ed answered almost all of her emails afterwards. He was cheerful, non-committal. He said how good it was to have spent time with someone who understood how weird it was just to have got out of a serious relationship, how important it was to spend time by yourself. She didn’t answer that one. Oddly, she said nothing specific about the product launch or that the stock had gone through the roof. She would have made more than £100,000. Perhaps she was busy sticking pins into a picture of him. Perhaps she had lost the cheque. Perhaps she was in Guadeloupe. Every time he thought about what he had done his stomach lurched. He tried not to think about it.

  He changed his mobile-phone number, telling himself it was an accident that he forgot to let her know. Eventually her emails tailed off. Two months passed. He took Ronan on a couple of nights out and they moaned about the Suits; Ed listened to Ronan as he weighed up the pros and cons of the not-for-profit soup girl and felt he’d learned a valuable lesson. Or dodged a bullet. He wasn’t sure which.

  And then, two weeks after the SFAX launch, he had been lying down in the creatives’ room, idly throwing a foam ball at the ceiling and listening to Ronan discuss how best to solve a glitch in the payment software when Sidney, the finance director, had walked in and he had suddenly understood that there were far worse problems you could create for yourself than overly clingy girlfriends.

  ‘Ed?’

  ‘What?’

  A short pause.

  ‘That’s how you answer a phone call? Seriously? At what age exactly are you going to acquire some social skills?’

  ‘Hi, Gemma.’ Ed sighed, and swung his leg over the bed so that he was seated.

  ‘You said you were going to call. A week ago. So I thought, you know, that you must be trapped under a large piece of furniture.’

  He looked around the bedroom. At the suit jacket that hung over the chair. At the clock, which told him it was a quarter past seven. He rubbed the back of his neck. ‘Yeah. Well. Things came up.’

  ‘I called your work. They said you were at home. Are you ill?’

  ‘No, I’m not ill, just … working on something.’

  ‘So does that mean you’ll have some time to come and see Dad?’

  He closed his eyes. ‘I’m kind of busy right now.’

  Her silence was weighty. He pictured his sister at the other end of the line, her jaw set, her eyes raised to Heaven.

  ‘He’s asking for you. He’s been asking for you for ages.’

  ‘I will come, Gem. Just … I’m … I’m out of town. I have some stuff to sort out.’

  ‘We all have stuff to sort out. Just call him, okay? Even if you can’t actually get into one of your eighteen luxury cars to visit. Call him. He’s been moved to Victoria Ward. They’ll pass the phone to him if you call.’

  ‘Okay.’

  He thought she was about to ring off, but she didn’t. He heard a small sigh.

  ‘I’m pretty tired, Ed. My supervisors are not being very helpful about me taking time off. So I’m having to go up there every weekend. Mum’s just about holding it together. I could really, really do with a bit of back-up here.’

  He felt a pang of guilt. His sister was not a complainer. ‘I’ve told you I’ll try and get there.’

  ‘You said that last week. Look, you could drive there in four hours.’

  ‘I’m not in London.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  He looked out of the window at the darkening sky. ‘The south coast.’

  ‘You’re on holiday?’

  ‘Not holiday. It’s complicated.’

  ‘It can’t be that complicated. You have zero commitments.’

  ‘Yeah. Thanks for reminding me.’

  ‘Oh, come on. It’s your company. You get to make the rules, right? Just grant yourself an extra two weeks’ holiday. Be the Kim Jong-un of your company. Dictate!’

  Another long silence.

  ‘You’re being weird,’ she said finally.

  Ed took a deep breath before he spoke. ‘I’ll sort something. I promise.’

  ‘Okay. And ring Mum.’

  ‘I will.’

  There was a click as the line went dead.

  Ed stared at the phone for a moment, then dialled his lawyer’s office. The phone went straight through to the answering machine.

  The investigating officers had pulled out every drawer in the apartment. They hadn’t tossed it all out, like they did in the movies, but had gone through it methodically, wearing gloves, checking between the folds of T-shirts, going through every file. Both his laptops had been removed, his memory sticks and his two phones. He had had to sign for it all, as if this was being done for his own benefit. ‘Get out of town, Ed,’ his lawyer had told him. ‘Just go and try not to think too much. I’ll call you if I need you to come in.’

  They had searched this place too, apparently. There was so little stuff here it had taken them less than an hour.

  Ed looked around him at the bedroom of the holiday home, at the crisp Belgian linen duvet that the cleaners had put on that morning, at the drawers that held an emergency wardrobe of jeans, pants, socks and T-shirts.

  ‘Get out of town,’ Sidney had said. ‘If this gets out you’re seriously going to fuck with our share price.’

  Ronan hadn’t spoken to him since the day the police had come to the office.

  He stared at the phone. Other than Gemma, there was now not a single person he could call just to talk to without explaining what had happened. Everyone he knew was in tech and, apart from Ronan, he wasn’t sure right now how many of those would qualify as actual friends. He stared at the wall. He thought about the fact that during the last week he had driven up and down to London four times just because, without work, he hadn’t known what to do with himself. He thought back to the previous evening when he had been so angry, with Deanna Lewis, with Sidney, with what the fuck had happened to his life, that he had hurled an entire bottle of white wine at the wall and smashed it. He thought about the likelihood of that happening again if he was left to his own devices.

  There was nothing else for it. He shouldered his way into his jacket, picked a fob of keys from the locked cupboard beside the back door and headed out to the car.

  4.

  Jess

  There had always been something a bit different about Tanzie. At a year old she would lin
e up her blocks in rows or organize them into patterns, then pull one or two away, making new shapes. By the time she was two she was obsessed with numbers. Before she even started school she would go through those books you can get full of maths problems and ask questions, like, ‘Why is a one written as “1” and not “2”?’ or tell Jess that multiplication was ‘just another way of doing addition’. At six she could explain the meaning of ‘tessellate’.

  Marty didn’t like it. It made him uncomfortable. But then anything that wasn’t ‘normal’ made Marty uncomfortable. It was the thing that made Tanzie happy, just sitting there, ploughing through problems that neither of them could begin to understand. Marty’s mother, on the rare occasions that she visited, used to call her a swot. She would say it like it wasn’t a very nice thing to be.

  ‘So what are you going to do?’

  ‘There’s nothing I can do right now.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it feel weird, her mixing with all the private-school kids?’

  ‘I don’t know. Yes. But that would be our problem. Not hers.’

  ‘What if she grows away from you? What if she falls in with a posh lot and gets embarrassed by her background?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m just saying. I think you could mess her up. I think she could lose sight of where she comes from.’

  Jess looked over at Nathalie, who was driving. ‘She comes from the Shitty Estate of Doom, Nat. As far as that goes, I would be happy if she got early-onset Alzheimer’s.’

  Something weird had happened since Jess had told Nathalie about the interview. It was as if she had taken it personally. All morning she had gone on and on about how her children were happy at the local school, about how glad she was that they were ‘normal’, how it didn’t do for a child to be ‘different’.

  The truth of it was, Jess thought, that Tanzie had come home from the interview more excited than she had been in months. Her scores had been 100 per cent in maths and 99 per cent in non-verbal reasoning. (She was actually annoyed by the missing one per cent.) Mr Tsvangarai, ringing to tell her, said there might be other sources of funding. Details, he kept calling them, although Jess couldn’t help thinking that people who thought money was a ‘detail’ were the kind who had never really had to worry about it.

  ‘And you know she’d have to wear that prissy uniform,’ Nathalie said, as they pulled up at Beachfront.

  ‘She won’t be wearing a prissy uniform,’ Jess responded irritably.

  ‘Then she’ll get teased for not being like the rest of them.’

  ‘She won’t be wearing a prissy uniform because she won’t be bloody going. I haven’t got a hope of sending her, Nathalie. Okay?’

  Jess got out of the car, slamming the door and walking in ahead of her so that she didn’t have to listen to anything else.

  It was only the locals who called Beachfront ‘the holiday park’; the developers called it a ‘destination resort’. Because this was not a holiday park like the Sea Bright caravan park on the top of the hill, a chaotic jumble of wind-battered mobile homes and seasonal lean-to tents: this was a spotless array of architect-designed ‘living spaces’ set among carefully manicured paths and lodges, in tended patches of woodland. There was a sports club, a spa, tennis courts, a huge pool complex, which the locals were not allowed to use after all, a handful of overpriced boutiques and a mini-supermarket so that residents did not have to venture into the scrappier confines of the town.

  Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays Benson & Thomas cleaned the two three-bedroomed rental properties that overlooked the clubhouse, then moved on to the newer properties: six glass-fronted modernist houses that stood on the chalk cliff and looked straight out across the sea.

  Mr Nicholls kept a spotless Audi in his driveway that they had never once seen move. A woman who said she was his sister came once with two small children and a grey-looking husband (they left the place immaculately clean). Mr Nicholls himself rarely visited, and had never, in the year they’d been doing it, used either the kitchen or the laundry room. Jess made extra cash doing his towels and sheets, laundering and ironing them weekly for guests who never came.

  It was a vast house; its slate floors echoed, its living areas were covered with great expanses of sea-grass matting and there was an expensive sound system wired into the walls. The glass frontages gazed out onto the wide blue arc of the horizon. But there were no photographs on the walls, or suggestions of any kind of actual life. Nathalie always said that even when he came it was as if he was camping there. There must have been women – Nathalie once found a lipstick in the bathroom, and last year they had discovered a pair of tiny lacy knickers under the bed (La Perla) and a bikini top – but there was little to suggest anything else about him.

  Jess thought of her own house, the narrow, creaking stairs, the peeling wallpaper, and unusually (she rarely thought about clients’ houses in relation to her own – that truly was the way to madness) she felt briefly wistful for all this space. This was a man who’d never had to put a clothes rail on the upstairs landing, or run out of space for bookshelves. This was a man who’d never fretted about how to find a registration fee.

  ‘He’s here,’ muttered Nathalie.

  As they closed the front door, a man’s voice echoed down the corridor, his voice loud, his tone argumentative, as if on the telephone. Nathalie pulled a face at Jess and walked slowly through the hallway.

  ‘Cleaners,’ she called. He did not respond, but he must have heard.

  The argument continued the whole time it took to clean the kitchen (he had used one mug, and the bin held two empty takeaway cartons). There was broken glass in the corner by the fridge, small green splinters, as if someone had picked up the larger pieces but couldn’t be bothered with the rest. And there was wine up the walls. Jess washed them down carefully. The place smelt like a brewery. And he was still arguing. She couldn’t hear what he was saying, as his door was partially closed and too far away, but even muffled and at a distance his frustration was evident. She and Nathalie worked in silence, speaking in murmurs, trying to pretend they couldn’t hear.

  When they had finished the kitchen Nathalie moved on to the living room and Jess headed down the hall. She did the downstairs loo, then the dining room, with its untouched bleached oak table and perfectly matched chairs. She dusted the picture frames with a soft cloth, tilting the odd one a centimetre or two to show they’d been done. Outside on the decking sat an empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s with one glass; she picked them up and brought them inside.

  While she washed up, she thought about Nicky, who had returned from school the previous day with a cut ear, the knees of his trousers scuffed with dirt. He shrugged off any attempt to talk about it. His preferred life now consisted of people on the other side of a screen; boys Jess had never met and never would, boys he called SK8RBOI and TERM-N-ATOR who shot and disembowelled each other for fun. Who could blame him? His real life seemed to be the actual war zone.

  She thought about Tanzie, and how she’d looked while talking to that maths teacher. Ever since the interview Jess had lain awake, doing calculations in her head, adding and subtracting in a way that would have made Tanzie laugh. The scholarship would not leave her head. It had lodged in there like toothache, and Jess worried away at it, trying every possible way to build financial mountains out of molehills. She sold her belongings. She ran through mental lists of every single person she might be able to borrow money from and who wouldn’t mind if it took time to pay it back. She considered the most likely, and the most unlikely people – her mother, her aunt Nell in Dorset, the retired teacher she used to clean for who always said he could see that Tanzie was a bright girl – but while she might have been able to beg fifty pounds here and there, there was nobody who would lend ten times that much. Nobody she knew even had it.

  The only people likely to offer Jess money were the sharks who circled the estate with their hidden four-figure interest rates. She had seen neighbours who had borrowed from friendly re
ps who turned gimlet-eyed, hanging over them like financial vultures. And again and again she came back to Marty’s words. Was McArthur’s comp really so bad? Some children did well there. There was no reason why Tanzie shouldn’t be one of them, if she kept out of the way of the troublemakers.

  The hard truth of it was there like a brick wall. Jess was going to have to tell her daughter that she couldn’t make it add up. Jess Thomas, the woman who always found a way through, who spent her life telling the two of them that it would All Work Out, couldn’t make it work out.

  She finished the dining room in which no dining had ever taken place, and observed with some distant part of her that the loud talking had stopped. Mr Nicholls must finally be off the phone. She hauled the vacuum cleaner down the hallway, wincing as it bumped against her shin, and knocked on the door to see if he wanted his office cleaned. There was silence, and as she knocked again he yelled suddenly, ‘Yes, I’m well aware of that, Sidney. You’ve said so fifteen times, but it doesn’t mean –’

  It was too late: she had pushed the door half open. Jess began to apologize, but with barely a glance the man held up a palm, like she was some kind of a dog – stay – then leaned forwards and slammed the door in her face. The sound reverberated around the house.

  Jess stood there, shocked into immobility, her skin prickling with embarrassment.

  ‘I told you,’ Nathalie said, as she scrubbed furiously at the guest bathroom a few minutes later. ‘Those private schools don’t teach them any manners.’

  Forty minutes later they were finished. Jess gathered Mr Nicholls’s immaculate white towels and sheets into her holdall, stuffing them in with more force than was strictly necessary. She walked downstairs and placed the bag next to the cleaning crate in the hall. Nathalie was polishing the doorknobs. It was one of her things. She couldn’t bear fingerprints on taps or doorknobs. Sometimes it took them ten minutes to leave an address.

  ‘Mr Nicholls, we’re going now.’

  He was standing in the kitchen, just staring out through the window at the sea, one hand on the top of his head like he’d forgotten it was there. He had dark hair and was wearing those glasses that are supposed to be trendy but just make you look like you’ve dressed up as Woody Allen. He wore a suit like a twelve-year-old forced to go to a christening.