The Other Woman’s House

by Sophie Hannah

  ‘I’m not.’ Colin Sellers would have had a jokey response ready, but Sam couldn’t think of one.

  Alice closed her eyes and took a sip of her drink. ‘The right time will come,’ she said.

  5

  Saturday 17 July 2010

  ‘1.2 million pounds? Oh…Ow! Ouch.’ My mother has missed the five mugs lined up on the worktop and poured boiling water over her left hand instead. Deliberately, though I can’t prove it. She has burned herself, and it’s my fault for causing her more worry than she can cope with. Again. She wants everybody to notice and blame me. If they do, if Fran or Anton or Dad says, ‘Look what you’ve done, Con,’ Mum will stick up for me, but her defence will be a veiled attack: ‘It wasn’t Connie’s fault – I should have known better than to look away, with a kettle full of boiling water in my hand, but I was so shocked, I couldn’t help it.’

  Is this what being close to someone means – knowing their limitations, their ego-boosting delusions and self-serving grottiness, as well as you know your own? Being able to predict their reactions, their facial expressions, down to the last word and grimace, so that disappointment and a sickening sense of predictability surge up and crush the breath out of you the moment you clap eyes on them, before anyone’s uttered a word? Kit would say that was too pessimistic an analysis, but then he was never close to his parents, and now he has no relationship with them at all. He is for ever saying he envies me my membership of what he calls ‘the Monk clan’. I don’t dare tell him the truth; he would accuse me of being ungrateful. He’d probably be right.

  The truth is that I would rather be less close to my family, so that they could surprise me from time to time. So that their disapproval, when it came, wouldn’t have the capacity to burrow so deeply into me and plant seeds of self-doubt, pre-programmed to grow to the size of large oak trees. At least Kit is free.

  ‘Come on, Benji,’ Fran whispers. ‘One more bit of broccoli and then you can have a chocolate finger. Just the curly bit at the top. Please.’

  ‘Go on, Benji, mate – show Mummy and Daddy how brave you are. Like a superhero!’ Anton doesn’t bother to lower his voice. It hasn’t occurred to him that there’s anything more important going on in his parents-in-law’s kitchen today than Benji’s war on green vegetables; he feels no need to confine the broccoli negotiations to the background. Making a loudspeaker out of his hands, he puts on a booming voice and says, ‘Can one little boy defeat the broccoli monster? Is Benji brave enough to eat…his…broccoli? If he proves that he’s as brave as a superhero, his reward will be two…chocolate…fingers!’

  Am I going mad? Didn’t Anton hear any of what I said, about seeing a murdered woman lying in a pool of blood, and talking to a detective this morning? Why is no one telling him to shut up? Did nobody hear me? That none of them should have anything to say on the subject seems as impossible to me as what I saw on my laptop last night – impossible, yet real, unless I’ve lost my capacity to distinguish reality from its opposite.

  Kit thinks I have. Maybe my family do also, and that’s why they’re ignoring me.

  ‘Don’t say two,’ Fran admonishes Anton in a sing-song voice, wearing an exaggerated smile in order, presumably, to prevent their son from wondering if the emotional carnage of a broken home might be all he has to look forward to. ‘One’s enough, isn’t it, Benji?’

  ‘I want two chocolate fingers!’ my five-year-old nephew wails, red in the face.

  I open my mouth, then close it. Why waste my breath? I’ve done what I came here to do: told my family what they need to know. In order not to look as if I’m waiting to be asked questions, I glance out of the window at the swing, slide, climbing-frame, treehouse, free-standing sandpit and two trampolines in my parents’ back garden: Benji’s private playground. Kit calls it ‘Neverland’.

  ‘Ow,’ Mum says again, making a big show of examining the red skin on her hand. She’s wasting her time with Fran and Anton; she ought to know that the ordeal of Benji’s supper has driven away all other thoughts, as well as their normal powers of observation.

  ‘All right, two chocolate fingers,’ says Fran wearily. ‘Sorry about this, everybody. Come on, though, Benji – eat this first.’ She takes the fork from his hand, impales the broccoli on it and holds it in front of his mouth, so that it’s touching his lips.

  He yanks his head away, spitting, and nearly falls off his chair. Together, like anxious cheerleaders, Fran and Anton yell, ‘Don’t fall off your chair!’

  ‘I hate broccoli! It looks like a yucky lumpy snot tree!’

  Privately, Kit and I refer to him as Benjamin Rigby. Kit started it, and, after a few cursory protests, I went along with it. His full name is Benji Duncan Geoffrey Rigby-Monk. ‘You’re joking,’ Kit said, when I first told him. ‘Benji? Not even Benjamin?’ Duncan and Geoffrey are his two grandads’ names – both unglamorous and old-dufferish, in Kit’s view, and not worth inflicting on a new generation – and Rigby-Monk is a fusion of Fran’s surname and Anton’s. ‘As far as I’m concerned, he’s Benjamin Rigby,’ said Kit, after the first time we met him. ‘He seems like a decent baby and he deserves a decent name. Not that his father’s got one, so I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.’ Kit thinks it’s only acceptable to ‘go around calling yourself Anton’, as he puts it, if you’re Spanish, Mexican or Colombian, or if you’re a hairdresser or a professional ice-skater.

  He tells me I ought to be grateful for my family, and pleased to live so near to them, and then he mocks them mercilessly in front of me, and avoids seeing them whenever he can, sending me round here on my own instead. I never complain; I feel guilty for entangling him. I would hate to marry someone with a family as overwhelming and ever-present as mine.

  ‘Leave the poor child alone, Fran,’ says my mum. ‘It’s not worth the effort, for one measly floret of broccoli. I’ll make him ch—’

  ‘Don’t!’ Fran cuts her off with a frantic wave of the arm, before the fatal words ‘chicken nuggets and chips’ are spoken aloud. ‘We’re fine, aren’t we, Benj? You’re going to eat your nice yummy healthy greens, aren’t you, darling? You want to grow big and strong, don’t you?’

  ‘Like Daddy,’ Anton adds, flexing his muscles. He used to be a personal trainer at Waterfront, but gave up his job when Benji was born. Now he lifts weights and hones his biceps, or sinews, or whatever fit people call the parts of their body that need honing, on various odd-looking machines in his and Fran’s garage, which he’s turned into a home gym. ‘Daddy ate all his greens when he was little, and look at him now!’

  At this point my father would normally pipe up with, ‘The only way to turn children into good eaters is to present them with a simple choice: they eat what everyone else is eating, or nothing at all. That soon teaches them. It worked with you two. You’ll eat anything, both of you. You’d eat your mother if she was on the plate!’ He’s said that, or a version of it, at least fifty times. Even when Fran hasn’t been there, he still says ‘you two’ rather than ‘you and Fran’, because he’s so used to all of us being together in this room, exactly as we are now: him sitting at the rickety pine trestle table that’s been in Thorrold House’s kitchen since before I was born, with the Times in front of him; Mum bustling around preparing food and drinks and waiting on everybody, refusing all offers of help so that she can sigh and rub the small of her back when she finally finishes loading the dishwasher; Anton leaning diagonally – in the manner of someone too cool to stand upright – against the rail of the Aga, which was once red but is now cross-hatched with silver from years of scratches; Fran fussing over Benji, trying to force one Brussels sprout, one leaf of spinach, one pea into his mouth, offering him vats of chocolate mousse, mountains of crisps and endless sugary butter balls as an incentive.

  And me sitting in the rocking-chair by the window, fantasising about wrapping a thick blanket around my head and smothering myself, biting back the urge to say, ‘Wouldn’t it be better for him to have fish, potatoes and no courgette rather than fish, p
otatoes, a bit of courgette, twenty Benson and Hedges, a bottle of vodka and some crack cocaine? Just wondering.’

  I’m at my most vicious when I’m with my family. One good reason why I shouldn’t live a hundred and fifty yards down the road from them.

  ‘Do you think I ought to run it under the cold tap,’ Mum says to Dad, stroking her hand. ‘Isn’t that what they say you should do with burns? Or are you supposed to put butter on them? I haven’t burned myself for years.’ She’s given up hope of attracting Fran’s or Anton’s attention, but she’s a fool if she can’t see that Dad’s too angry with me to listen to anything she might say. The extent of his fury is clear from his posture: head bowed, forehead pulled into a tight frown, shoulders hard and hunched, hands balled into fists. He’s wearing a blue and yellow striped shirt, but I’m sure if Alice were here she would agree with me that the energy radiating from him is a stony grey. He hasn’t moved at all for nearly fifteen minutes; the grinning, back-slapping Dad who ushered me in here when I arrived has vanished and been replaced by a statue, or sculpture, which, if I were the artist, I would call ‘Enraged Man’.

  ‘Have you lost your marbles?’ He spits the words at me. ‘You can’t afford a house for 1.2 million!’

  ‘I know that,’ I tell him. It isn’t only the prospect of my financial recklessness that’s bothering him. He resents the upheaval I’ve brought into his life without consulting him. We used to be a family that, between us, had never seen a murdered woman who then inexplicably disappeared. Now, thanks to me, that’s no longer true.

  ‘If you know you can’t afford a 1.2-million-pound house, then why were you looking at one?’ Mum says, as if she’s caught me out with a particularly clever logical manoeuvre. She shakes her head from side to side slowly, rhythmically, as if she intends to carry on for ever, as if I’ve given her more than enough cause for eternal anguish. In her mind, I’ve already bankrupted myself and brought shame on the family. She has the capacity to enter a dimension that’s inaccessible to most ordinary mortals: the ten-years-into-the-future worst-case scenario. It’s as real to her as the present moment; so vivid is it, in fact, that most of the time the present doesn’t stand a chance against it.

  ‘Don’t you ever look at things you can’t afford?’ I ask her.

  ‘No, I certainly do not!’ Conversation over. Like the metal clasp of an old-fashioned purse, clipping shut. I should have known. My mother never does anything apart from the most sensible thing. ‘And nor should you, and nor would you, unless you were tempted, and considering mortgaging yourself up to the hilt for the—’

  ‘Mum, there’s no way they’d get a mortgage for that much,’ Fran chips in. ‘You’re worrying about nothing, as usual. They won’t buy that house because they can’t. In the current climate, Melrose Cottage would sell for maximum three hundred thousand, most of which would go back to the Rawndesley and Silsford Building Society. Even if Con and Kit put in all their savings, no lender in their right mind would let them borrow over a million quid.’

  It makes me want to scream that my sister knows as much about Kit’s and my finances as we do. When she says ‘savings’, she has an exact figure in mind – the correct one. I know about her and Anton’s money in the same way: their ISAs, their mortgage, their exact monthly income now that Anton has stopped working, how much they pay in school fees for Benji (hardly anything), how much Mum and Dad pay (almost all of it). ‘I don’t know why some families are so cagey about all things financial,’ Mum has been saying for as long as I can remember. ‘Why treat the people closest to you like strangers?’

  When I was twelve and Fran ten, Mum showed us the blue pocket-book for her and Dad’s Halifax savings account, so that we could see that they’d saved four hundred and seventy-three thousand pounds and fifty-two pence. I remember staring at the blue handwritten figure and being impressed and somewhat stunned by it, thinking my parents must be geniuses, that I could never hope to be as clever as them. ‘We’re always going to be okay, because we’ve got this money as a cushion,’ Mum said. Both Fran and I fell for her propaganda, and spent our teenage years hoarding our pocket money in our savings accounts, while our friends were blowing every penny they had on lipstick and cider.

  ‘If you think your mother and I are going to lend you money so that you can live beyond your means, you can forget it,’ says Dad. In his and Mum’s eyes, living beyond one’s means is on a par, ethically, with tipping small babies out of windows.

  ‘I don’t think that,’ I tell him. I wouldn’t ask my parents to lend me a hundred pounds, let alone a million. ‘I wouldn’t want to buy 11 Bentley Grove even if I could afford it ten times over and there were no other houses in the world.’ I stop short of explaining why. It ought to be obvious.

  ‘Do you really think my hypothetical extravagance is what we ought to be talking about? What about the dead woman lying in her own blood? Why don’t we talk about that instead? Why are you all avoiding it? I did tell you, didn’t I? I could have sworn I told you what I saw on Roundthehouses, and about the detective who came round—’

  ‘You didn’t see a dead woman on Roundthehouses or anywhere else,’ Dad cuts me off. ‘I’ve never heard such a load of twaddle in my life. You said yourself: when Kit came to look, there was no body. Right?’

  ‘That’s what you said,’ Mum adds nervously, as if she fears I’m a loose cannon, likely to change my story.

  I nod.

  ‘Then there was no body – you imagined it,’ says Dad. ‘You ought to ring that copper and apologise for wasting his time.’

  ‘I’m sure if I stayed up until goodness knows what time of night, I’d start hallucinating too,’ Mum contributes. ‘I keep telling you, but you never listen: you need to look after yourself better. You and Kit both work too hard, you stay up too late, you don’t always eat properly…’

  ‘Give it a rest, Mum,’ says Fran. ‘You don’t do yourself any favours. Come on, Benji, open your mouth, for Christ’s sake. Big wide mouth!’

  ‘Do you think I imagined it, Fran?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘Not necessarily. Maybe. Three chocolate fingers, Benji, if you open your mouth and eat this yummy…That’s right! Bit wider…’

  ‘What do you think, Anton?’ I ask him.

  ‘I don’t think you’d have seen it if it wasn’t there,’ he says. I’m considering leaping out of my chair and throwing my arms around him when he ruins it by adding, ‘Sounds like someone’s idea of a practical joke to me. I wouldn’t let it worry you.’ As answers go, it’s only a fraction less dismissive than, ‘I can’t be bothered with this – it’s too much effort.’

  ‘You shouldn’t be looking at houses in Cambridge at any price,’ says Mum. ‘Millionaires’ Row or…Paupers’ Parade. Have you forgotten what happened last time you went down that route?’

  ‘Mum, for God’s sake!’ says Fran.

  ‘At least there was a reason last time – Kit being offered a promotion.’

  Which he couldn’t accept, because I ruined everything for him. Thanks for reminding me.

  ‘Why now, all of a sudden?’ Mum pleads, adopting what’s probably her favourite of her many voices: the frail, reedy warble of a broken woman. ‘You and Kit have got a thriving business, a lovely home, you’ve got all of us right on your doorstep, your sister, lovely Benji – why would you want to move to Cambridge now? I mean, if it was London, I could understand it, with Kit working there as much as he does – though heaven knows why anyone would want to live in such a noisy, scruffy hell-hole – but Cambridge…’

  ‘Because we should have moved in 2003, and we didn’t, and I’ve regretted it ever since.’ I’m on my feet, and I’m not sure why. Did I plan to storm out of the room? Out of the house? Mum and Dad stare at me as if they don’t understand what I’ve just said. Dad turns away, makes a breathy, growling noise I haven’t heard before. It frightens me.

  Why do I always ruin things for everybody? What’s wrong with me?

  ‘Hooray! Benji
ate his broccoli!’ Anton cheers, again through a pretend loudspeaker, apparently oblivious to the invisible strings of tension stretched tautly from one end of the kitchen to the other. Maybe I am suffering from a disease that makes you hallucinate; I can see those strings as clearly as if they were real, with unspoken threats and glowing grudges hanging from them like Christmas decorations.

  ‘Benji’s the champion!’ Anton bellows, as Fran waves the empty fork in the air in triumph.

  ‘Benji’s five, not two,’ I snap. ‘Why don’t you try talking to him normally, instead of like a low-budget children’s party entertainer?’

  ‘Because’ – Anton continues in his false booming voice – ‘it’s only when Daddy talks like this and makes him laugh…that he eats his broccoli!’

  Benji isn’t laughing. He’s trying not to gag on the food he hates.

  Anton’s impermeable jollity makes me want to scream a torrent of insults at him. The only time I’ve ever seen the mildest of frowns pass across his face was when a Monk & Sons customer referred to him as a house-husband. Fran quickly corrected her in a way that sounded forced, learned by heart. I made the mistake of repeating the story to Kit, who instantly developed a Pavlovian response to hearing Anton’s name: ‘Anton – not a house-husband, but a personal trainer taking an open-ended career break.’

  ‘Low-budget!’ Mum pounces on the phrase. ‘Of course, you’re high-end now, aren’t you, with your 1.2-million-pound house?’

  ‘Completely unaffordable 1.2-million-pound house,’ Fran is quick to say. It bothers her that Kit and I are better off than she and Anton are, though I’m not sure she would admit it to herself. It’s been worse since Kit left Deloitte and we started our own business. If Nulli came a cropper, Fran would be sympathetic, upset on our behalf, but also relieved. I’m certain of this, but I can’t prove it. I can’t prove a lot of things at the moment.