by Nicci French
As Mary introduced me, I saw the now-familiar concern passing across everybody’s face. It was clear that Mary had briefed them in advance about my situation. But I soon had other things to worry about. Mary said we must eat and muttered something under her breath about everything being spoiled.
I was grateful, in theory at least, to Mary for inviting me. It can’t have been the most enticing prospect. She must have known I wouldn’t be the life and soul of the party. The others seemed constrained as well, perhaps with the effort of avoiding any subject that might seem inappropriate: death, funerals, marriages. And I now knew rather too much about the state of Mary’s marriage; I kept glancing at Eric, then looking away when he caught my eye. Geoff told me in unnecessary detail about the cycling holiday he had gone on in the year after he had met Mary and Eric, and in even more unnecessary detail about the cycling holiday he was planning for the summer. ‘Do you cycle?’ he asked finally.
‘No,’ I said, which was a bit of a conversation stopper – at least, that was what it was intended to be. I turned to Laura who leaned towards me, put her hand on mine and said, ‘Ellie, how are you?’
‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘I mean, as fine as can be expected.’
‘I just wanted to say,’ said Laura, ‘that if there’s anything I can do, then just ask.’
I made myself respond appropriately to her: I thanked her and said it wasn’t really about help, just about getting through it and about friends being there for me, and by the time I’d got to the end of the sentence I couldn’t remember how it had begun. In the meantime, I wasn’t doing full justice to Mary’s cooking. The first course consisted of a selection of Greek mezes: hummus, rice wrapped in vine leaves, taramasalata, little slices of fried haloumi, olives attached to lumps of feta with cocktail sticks. It would have been mouth-watering if I hadn’t just eaten a huge buttery baked potato. Eric filled my plate for me, as if double helpings were a cure for grief. I nibbled at things, cut them up and rearranged them on my plate, in the hope that this would give the impression of lots of eating.
The Greek theme continued with the main course. Mary had cooked a hearty moussaka, and Eric spooned a huge slab on to my plate. I made him spoon half of it back and devoted much ingenuity, effort and clutter to cutting up the food and occasionally moving it towards my mouth. I put the same effort into not drinking the wine, because I was already about three drinks ahead of everybody else.
I toyed with the cheese and biscuits, too, and Mary finally asked if I was feeling unwell. I said I was fine and she let it go at that, probably attributing my lack of appetite to grief. I didn’t hold back on the coffee, though. I drank three strong mugs, after which my hands were trembling and I felt fiercely, inhumanly awake, yet tired at the same time.
At the end of the evening, I turned down Geoff’s offer of a lift home. I wanted to walk to clear my head, work the coffee out of my system. Anyway, I liked walking at night in the city and I needed to think, to sort things out in my head.
I’d half decided I wasn’t going back to Frances’s office, because it was wrong in every way, but looking back on the evening at Mary’s, I also felt I couldn’t continue like that. From the outside, I probably seemed all right, like a robot that had been fairly well programmed to behave like a human being: I hadn’t made a scene, I hadn’t cried, I hadn’t embarrassed anybody. From my point of view, from the inside, it was a different story.
Perhaps it was a sign of success to make it through the day and then to the end of the evening without cracking up, or screaming, or having a flaming row. But that wasn’t what I wanted from my life, that horrible feeling of dissociation, of acting a part that didn’t belong to me, of being a person I no longer knew. That and not knowing the truth about Greg. They seemed to be separate things, but in my mind they were linked. If I could just discover that Greg and that woman had been having an affair or that they hadn’t, I could start my new life as a real person. If I could find the letter or the email or the postcard that showed he had slept with her, because I had been too much for him or too little, I could be angry with him and maybe, just maybe, forgive him.
So the next day I put on clothes that were business clothes, but not too much like business clothes because, anyway, I didn’t own any – you don’t dress up for restoring furniture in the shed in your garden. I selected black canvas trousers with a thin, pale-grey jersey, and tied back my hair in a messy bun, put on earrings, a silver chain round my neck, even eye-liner and mascara. Now I wasn’t Ellie but Gwen: helpful, calm, practical, discreet, ever so mathematical. I took my purse out of my bag; if, for no reason I could envisage, I needed it, I could pretend to have forgotten it. I just took a fistful of cash. I went through my shoulder bag carefully, removing anything that identified me by name. I looked at my left hand. No wedding ring.
At five past ten, when I arrived at her house, Frances opened the door with a smile of such welcome and relief that it made me smile back. ‘I thought you wouldn’t come,’ she said. ‘I thought maybe I’d hallucinated you yesterday, out of desperation. It’s such a disaster zone. I have to work here but you don’t.’
‘I’ll help out for a day or two,’ I said. ‘I’ve got work of my own to get back to, but you’re having a bad time, so if there’s anything I can do…’
‘I am having a bad time,’ said Frances, ‘a terrible time, and part of what’s terrible about it is that I don’t know what you can do to help, what anyone can do, apart from putting a match to it all.’
‘I can’t organize a party,’ I said, ‘or dress up as a waitress, or cook a five-course meal for forty people, but if someone could give me a cup of coffee, I’ll go through every piece of paper in this office and reply to it or do something about it or put it in a file or throw it away. And then I’ll get back to my own life.’
Frances’s smile changed to something of a frown. ‘What have I done to deserve you?’ she asked.
I felt the tiniest shiver of apprehension. Was I being too obvious? ‘I’m trying to do as I would be done by,’ I said. ‘Does that sound too yucky?’
Frances smiled again. ‘I’m a drowning person being dragged to the shore,’ she said. ‘Who cares?’
Chapter Thirteen
Beth arrived just after eleven. She apologized, saying she had been out late, but she looked entirely fresh and rested. And she was immaculately dressed, entirely different from the day before: a dark grey pencil skirt with a little slit up the back, shoes with very low heels, and a waistcoat over a crisp white shirt. Her skin glowed, her hair tumbled over her shoulders. She made me feel shabby, old and boring. She seemed surprised and not completely pleased to see me. ‘Where’s she going to work?’ she asked Frances.
‘She’s going to hover,’ I said, before Frances could reply. ‘Just sort out a few things and not get in anyone’s way.’
‘I was just asking,’ said Beth, and was interrupted by a merry tune from her mobile phone. She opened it and turned her back on me; I noticed there were seams on her black tights.
It was immediately obvious that it would take more than a day or two to restore order to the chaos of the office. It surprised me that Frances had let everything get into such a mess: she seemed the kind of person who would be calmly and instinctively organized: knickers folded in her underwear drawer, herbs and spices arranged alphabetically on the kitchen shelf, car insurance and MOT documents neatly filed.
‘Did Milena do the organizing and filing?’ I asked, as we drank our first coffee of the day, poured from a new cafetière.
‘That’s a laugh,’ said Frances. ‘No. Milena was the gorgeous public face of Party Animals. It was her job to schmooze the clients, flirt with the suppliers and come up with the brilliant ideas.’
‘What did you do?’ I asked.
‘We picked up the pieces,’ said Beth, from across the room.
‘She sounds quite a character,’ I said.
‘You must have seen that,’ said Frances.
‘I meant that you
don’t know what people are like at work,’ I gabbled, cursing myself silently. ‘You must miss her.’
‘She’s certainly left a gap,’ said Frances, as she picked up her phone and punched numbers into it.
I found some space by a work surface at the back of the office that gave out on to the steps that led up to the garden. I began to add to the piles of paper I had created the previous day. I tried to avoid speaking for a while, worried I might give myself away again. I felt startled and shifty every time Frances called me Gwen. Couldn’t she tell that I was not a between-jobs Gwen but an out-of-control Ellie, that my black trousers, grey jersey and eye-liner were a feeble disguise? I kept expecting a stern hand to fall on my shoulder.
‘How did you know Milena?’ Frances asked me.
‘Oh.’ My mind raced. ‘I met her at a fund-raising event. For breast cancer,’ I added. ‘It was boring and she was fun so we kept in touch. Vaguely. I can’t remember when I last saw her, though.’ I glanced at Frances: she didn’t seem to find my words incredible.
‘What do you do normally, Gwen?’ she asked.
‘I’m a maths teacher at a comprehensive school.’ So far so Gwen Abbott.
‘No wonder you’re good at this kind of thing. But why did you leave?’
‘I don’t know if I have left, not permanently. I’m taking a break. I like teaching but it’s so stressful.’ Frances nodded sympathetically and I warmed to my theme, remembering things Gwen had said, TV documentaries I’d watched, and my own schooldays, when I’d hated maths. ‘I teach in an inner-city school in…’ areas flashed through my mind and I seized on one that was far to the north but still in London ‘… Leytonstone. Half the kids don’t want to be there. Some hardly speak English and need much more support than they’re actually getting. Instead of teaching them, I try to keep order. I thought I’d take a few months out and think things over. If I’m going to make a change, it should be now. Maybe I’ll travel.’
‘Lovely,’ said Frances, staring at a brochure and frowning. ‘Where?’
‘Peru,’ I said. ‘Or I’ve always wanted to go to India.’ Without warning, tears stung my eyes. Greg and I had talked about going to India together. I blinked furiously and pushed two receipts into the appropriate folder.
‘Are you married?’
‘No. I was with someone for a long time but it didn’t work out.’ I gave a rueful shrug. ‘Between jobs and between relationships. So, you see, I have this rare moment of freedom.’
‘No children yet?’
‘No,’ I said shortly. And then I added, without realizing that I was going to, the words taking me by surprise, ‘I always wanted children,’ and for one fearful moment my defences were down and I was being me, Ellie, with a pain in her heart because she hadn’t been able to have children and now… I sat up straighter, snapped a folder shut. ‘Maybe one day,’ I said – Gwen said – with brisk cheerfulness.
‘I never wanted children,’ said Frances. ‘It seemed so time-consuming, so wearing, trading your freedom for someone else’s well-being. I watched friends turn from fun-loving, carefree creatures to people who talked about nappy rash and started yawning at eight o’clock and thought, That’s not for me. And David agreed. I used to thank God I was born into a time when it was permissible to admit to possessing no maternal feelings. But then, just a few years ago, I suddenly thought how nice it would be to have someone to care for like that. Would have been, I should say. Too late now. Tick-tock,’ she said, with a sad little laugh.
I didn’t get much information about Milena from the papers I went through on that first morning, just slapdash signatures on copies of letters about the cost of finger-food and the hire of champagne flutes, although I wrote down every relevant date and place in my little notebook. I decided to go for a more direct approach.
‘Tell me,’ I said, as we sat drinking another of the mugs of coffee that punctuated the day, ‘this man Milena died with: who was he?’ I ran my finger round the rim of the cup, trying to appear casual. Was my voice wobbling?
Frances shrugged. ‘I don’t know anything about him. I think he was married. Silvio said something about meeting his wife once. He seemed rather taken with her – but, then, Silvio’s an odd fish.’
My face felt hot. How would a normal person react? Should I ask who Silvio was? No. I was meant to know Milena. ‘You never met him?’
‘I never even knew he existed.’
‘Strange,’ I said.
‘Not in Milena’s world.’
‘How d’you mean?’ I put my mug down and shuffled papers, as if I wasn’t particularly interested in the answer.
‘Milena’s private life was always a bit complicated. And mysterious.’
‘You mean she was unfaithful.’
Frances’s face was flushed with either embarrassment or distress. ‘Basically, yes.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know. Didn’t her husband mind?’
Frances gave me an odd look. ‘I don’t know if he even knew. People see what they want to see, don’t they?’
‘So she didn’t confide in you?’
‘When she wanted to. I guessed she’d met someone new. She had the familiar radiance about her.’ She gave a small, sour smile. ‘You probably think I’m being heartless, speaking ill of the dead.’
‘You’re being honest. Milena was a complicated woman.’ I worried that I’d gone too far. I didn’t want Frances to think I was prodding her into being rude about her friend. ‘And messy,’ I said, standing up and crossing the room to fetch another pile of unsorted papers. ‘I’d better crack on with this lot.’
‘Gwen?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s really nice to have you here.’
I tried to smile. ‘It’s nice to be here.’
At lunchtime, Beth went upstairs to the kitchen and made us the kind of meal I’ve always imagined women eat after they’ve had their hair done: a light salad of green beans, butter beans and beansprouts, scattered with health-giving seeds and dressed with a lemon vinaigrette, and when we’d finished, I was hungrier than I had been before.
Answering Frances’s questions, I found out more about my life as Gwen: it turned out that she had grown up in Dorset, the youngest of five children, gone to Leeds University and studied maths and physics, that she liked gardening and even had an allotment (stop! I commanded myself – you know nothing about allotments), that her father was dead. I felt a growing anxiety as I made up a life on the spot. It would have been much simpler to stick to the facts of my own life – or that of the real Gwen at the very least. Now I had to remember what I had said. Beth didn’t speak but just looked at me. Had I made a mistake? All it would take was for Beth or Frances to be a bit too familiar with Dorset or Leeds or Leytonstone, and who knows what would happen? At the same time, I felt a thrill of pleasure as I concocted a life for myself. I’d always wanted to be the youngest in a large, close family, rather than the eldest in a small, distant one, and now, for a few days, I was. And maybe I’d get an allotment. Why not? Anything is possible when you decide to be someone else.
*
At about four o’clock, when the day outside was thickening towards twilight, Beth answered the phone, then muttered something to Frances.
‘Bloody hell,’ said Frances. ‘All right, we’d better go.’ She sat lost in thought for a moment, then looked at me as if she had forgotten my existence. ‘Gwen,’ she said, ‘something’s come up. We’ve got to pop out. Would you mind holding the fort?’
I wouldn’t mind holding the fort. I positively wanted to hold the fort. I waited until the front door closed and I saw them – or, at least, their lower halves – walking past the basement window. Then I jumped up and started to prowl. I didn’t know what I was looking for, but I knew it probably wouldn’t be in any of the folders and files I was ploughing through. Maybe in the desk drawers. I yanked the first open and started rummaging among the stationery, finding nothing except envelopes, paper-clips, ink cartridges and Post-it
s. But in the second I came across two vodka bottles, one empty, the other half full. I sat for a minute or so, considering them, then replaced them and pushed the drawer shut. I turned my attention to the computer. I pinged it on and waited for it to load.
The doorbell rang, making me jolt in my chair, my heart pumping wildly in my chest and my throat suddenly dry. I turned off the computer, watched it count down and go blank. The bell rang again. I licked my lips, smoothed my hair, put on a Gwen-expression of calm inquiry and went to answer it.
The man standing on the step seemed surprised to see me. He was quite small and slim, almost gaunt, and dressed in a grey suit with a white shirt. He had hollow cheeks, quick grey eyes and brown hair that was starting to thin.
‘Can I help you?’ I asked.
‘Who are you?’
‘Why do you want to know?’
‘Are we going to go on just asking each other questions? Is Frances there? That’s another.’
‘No. I’m helping her out for a bit. I’m Gwen.’
‘Johnny.’ He reached out a hand and I shook it. He didn’t meet my eyes but looked over my shoulder as if he didn’t believe I was on my own. ‘Did Frances forget I was coming?’
‘She’s a bit distracted by everything. She’ll be back soon.’
‘I’ll wait.’
He walked past me, obviously at home in Frances’s office.
‘Do you work with Frances?’ I asked.
‘I sort out most of the food for her.’
‘You don’t look like a chef,’ I said. It came out sounding rather rude.
He looked down at his suit. ‘You think I’m pretending? I’ve been kicked upstairs into management, in line with which I’ve brought her a menu for next week. Do you want to see it?’
‘I’m not really the person to -’
‘You’re here, aren’t you?’
We sat together on the sofa and he showed me the menu. He told me how to make soufflés in advance; he said he sourced his ingredients locally; he put his hand on my arm; he told me his restaurant was called Zest, his signature dish was stuffed pig’s trotter and I had to pay him a visit there soon; he listened attentively when I spoke; he laughed and looked me in the eye; he called me Gwen with each sentence – ‘… don’t you think, Gwen?’ and ‘I’ll tell you what, Gwen…’ And Gwen flushed with self-consciousness and awkward, complicated pleasure.
