by Lisa Jewell
He sat on his sofa, pulled a cushion into his lap and held it there. And then he looked at the armchair and once again he was struck by the memory of Jane’s coat slung across the back of it. He picked up his phone and he opened up the text conversation that had started with Jane two weeks ago:
“Hi, this is Jane, the lady about the cat. I’ll be near you on Saturday about 11 a.m. Would it be OK for me to pop by then?”
“Yes, sure. My address is Flat 2, 5 St John’s Villas, NW1 1DT. I’ll see you then!”
“Great. Thanks!”
“Hi Adrian, I’m just leaving a kickboxing class in Highgate. I can be there in half an hour. Is that OK?”
“Sure Jane, I’m here until lunchtime so see you then.”
He switched off his phone and sat it on the sofa. What was this he was feeling? What kind of twisted anticipation was building in his gut? It was hot and overwhelming and it hit him that for the first time in almost a year he was feeling something stronger than grief.
He picked his phone up again, tapped out a text and pressed send before his brain sent a message to his gut to tell him he was making a mistake.
“Hi Jane. Lovely coincidence bumping into you just now. Hope you’re having a great evening and thank you again for being so wise about the cat. And everything. It has been a pleasure meeting you.”
Adrian rested the phone in the palm of his hand and stared at it, picturing suddenly and quite against his own will the handsome man called Matthew coiled naked around Jane, possibly with the single red rose clenched between his teeth. He placed the phone on the table and then he jumped in his seat as something vibrated near his thigh. He chased the vibration around the sofa with his hands until he found the source. A phone, tucked into the innards of his sofa. He switched it on and immediately saw his own text message.
His aging brain took a second or two to make sense of things. And then, of course, her phone. She’d left her phone. Jane had left her phone.
In his house.
6
Adrian met Cat for lunch the following day. Rather fortuitously, they both worked within a few streets of each other in Farringdon and tried to meet up for lunch at least once a week. Cat worked part-time for an animal charity. The rest of the time she was Caroline’s unofficial au pair, paid in bed, board and a hundred quid a week.
Adrian owned an architectural practice called, imaginatively, Adrian Wolfe Associates. He’d started the practice in a room above a pub in Tufnell Park when he was thirty-five, just him, two friends and a secretary. Now he employed thirty-eight people and occupied two floors of a converted Farringdon factory building. Most of their business came from social housing contracts, and really, these days, he was not much more than a genial figurehead. He had his pet clients, the ones he’d brought with him over the years, and he still liked to sink his teeth into a nice little bijou urban-dwelling project. But after more than a decade of being a filthy, caffeine-dependent, sleeping-on-the-sofa, missing-the-kids’-nativities workaholic, the death of Maya had forced him to take a step away from the business and he’d been amazed to see that the ship had kept on sailing without him at the helm. Instead of feeling disempowered or out of control, he’d taken it as a sign to slow down. Take a backseat. Let the young people whom he paid very generously take the strain.
Cat was sitting at a window table in their regular restaur-ant, her rather dramatic blue-black hair twisted into two fat buns over her ears. From a distance he’d thought she was wearing earmuffs, and had wondered why she would do so on a relatively warm March afternoon. The way his eldest daughter dressed alarmed him occasionally. It all seemed designed to draw attention to herself. Too much makeup, in his opinion. She’d even taken to wearing false eyelashes lately. And her body: Cat was all tits and bum and bumps and curves and appeared to want everyone in the world to know about each and every one of them. It wasn’t that Cat looked tarty, she just looked—to Adrian’s possibly unobjective eye—a little try-hard. And it pained him to say it, but he sometimes felt embarrassed being seen with her in public, in case people thought she was his girlfriend. The problem was that she didn’t look enough like him for it to be obvious that they were related. She didn’t look like her statuesque, straight-up-and-down, mouse-haired mother either. She was the image of Susie’s crazy Portuguese grandmother, whom Adrian had met a few times at the beginning of their relationship and who had once referred to Adrian as “a bit grubby and too thin.”
“Hello, darling,” he said, leaning down to hug her briefly.
“Hello, hello. You look like crap.”
“Yeah, thanks for that.” He pulled out his chair and took a seat. “Always so charming.”
“Yeah, right. Whatever, let’s order. I’m starving.”
Cat was always starving these days. Cat was always eating. If Cat carried on like this, he observed worriedly, she would probably be the size of a house by the time she was forty.
She ordered herself a big bowl of carbohydrates and a full-fat Coke. Adrian ordered himself an antipasti platter and a glass of water. Then he pulled Jane’s phone out of his jacket pocket and put it on the table between them.
“Why’ve you got such a shit phone?” she said, dunking a bread roll into a bowl of olive oil.
“It’s not mine,” he said.
“Right,” she said, reaching out to pick it up.
“There’s this girl . . .”
She groaned. “Oh God, Dad, no.”
He looked at her askance, slightly taken aback by her reaction. “No, no. Just a girl. She came to look at the cat. Remember, I put that card in the post office a few weeks ago?”
“Yeah. Yeah. Right.” She’d finished the first bread roll and was on to the second.
“Anyway. She came and looked at the cat, talked me into keeping her, stayed for a cup of coffee, really nice girl. Woman.”
“How old?” There was a hint of displeasure in the way she formed the question.
“I don’t know. About thirty? Maybe even forty. Hard to tell.” He kept his reply as neutral as he could, sensing something antagonistic in Cat’s demeanor. “Anyway. She talked me into keeping the cat and then I bumped into her last night on my way to meet you lot at Strada. We stopped. Had a chat. She was on a date. It was all of a minute. Went to Strada. Had dinner. Came home and then . . .” He glanced at the cheap phone. “I found this tucked down the side of the sofa. It’s hers. I’ve had a good look at it but I think I must be doing something wrong because all I can find on it is my number and the texts we sent to each other. There doesn’t seem to be an address book, a call history or anything. And that can’t be right, surely? So I thought what with you being a young person and all, you might be able to winkle something useful out of it.”
Cat stuffed the last hunk of the second bread roll into her mouth and picked up the phone. “Hm,” she said after a few minutes. “This is weird. I mean, basically, she must have got this phone with the express intention of using it to contact you. I mean, it is literally devoid of anything else. How totally weird. Oh Jesus.” She rolled her eyes. “You don’t think she’s in love with you, do you?”
Adrian snorted derisively. “No! Don’t be ridiculous! Of course she’s not.”
“Then—what?” She held her hands palms up.
“I have no idea. No idea whatsoever.”
A waiter brought Cat’s vat of pasta with salmon and cream sauce. She beamed at it. Then she looked at Adrian’s elegant wooden board of finely sliced meats and said, “Ooh, that looks good. Can I have some of your chorizo?”
“No!” said Adrian. “Eat your own food!”
She looked at him wickedly and stole a piece anyway. He pretended to slap the back of her hand and then groaned as she dropped the whole slice into her mouth in one.
“You are quite incredible,” he said.
“I know,” she said, picking up her cutlery. “So, the
big question is: if you bumped into her in the street last night and she left her phone in your flat on Sunday, why the fuck didn’t she ask you about it?”
“I know. I know. Exactly.”
“It’s almost as though . . .”
“She wanted me to have it. Yes. I know. I thought that. I thought that already.”
“So what are you going to do about it?”
“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “The thing is . . .” He fixed his gaze upon a small whorl in the wooden tabletop. “She was . . . I felt . . .” He wanted to tell her. He wanted to tell Cat that for the first time since that awful night last April, he was feeling open to the possibility of moving on. He wanted to tell her that this woman had opened a sealed-up door deep inside him and that he was almost euphoric with the possibility of having someone in his life again. But there was something in his daughter’s face, in her turn of phrase, that made him stop.
“Obviously,” he began gingerly, “this woman is not in love with me. But there is something going on here. Something strange. Do you think I should pursue it?”
Cat shrugged. “That depends what you’re ‘pursuing,’” she said.
Adrian smiled. “The mystery,” he said. “Just the mystery. But listen, Cat, it has been a year, you know. I mean, at some point I am going to be thinking about moving on. You don’t want me to be on my own for the rest of my life, do you?”
She shrugged again, picking something out of her teeth with a long fingernail. “Well. It’s not that I want you to be alone. Of course I don’t. But you probably shouldn’t be rushing into anything. I think it’s good for you to be by yourself.”
“Do you? Really? Don’t you worry about me?”
“No,” she said. “You’re a grown-up. You’ll get through this. You’ve got enough people worrying about you. I’m just waiting for you to shine.” She made ironic jazz hands to accompany this pronouncement.
He laughed drily.
“And you don’t need a woman to do that. IMO.”
IMO. Adrian smiled.
“But,” she said, curling creamy pasta around her fork, “if it’s just the mystery you’re pursuing and you haven’t got any dirty-old-man intentions towards this woman, I’d def be up for helping you to track her down.”
“Would you?”
“Yeah. Love a good mystery.” She turned on the phone again and used the side of her thumb to scroll through the messages while she deposited a forkful of pasta into her mouth with the other hand. “Here. This one.” She turned the phone towards him. “She said she was coming from a kickboxing class in Highgate. I could do some research into kickboxing classes. If you like?”
“That would be great, thanks, Cat.”
“No probs.” She smiled at him. “But no romance, Dad. No more bloody wives. Please.”
Adrian walked back to his office after lunch. He took the long route through the back streets of Farringdon, noticing for the first time that it was properly spring, that the restaurants had put their tables out onto the pavements and opened out their windows, that people were wearing sunglasses and girls had on open shoes. He felt the inside pocket of his jacket for last year’s sunglasses. They weren’t there. He had no idea where they might be. He could not remember if he’d even worn sunglasses last summer. He couldn’t remember last summer at all.
A young woman walked past with a tiny baby in a sling. The baby was fast asleep, its head flopped at ninety degrees. He smiled at the baby. Then he smiled at the mother. She smiled back at him and Adrian went on his way. Something was shifting inside him. Something that had been lodged in his gut for months. It was the grief. It was starting to melt around the edges, like a tub of frozen ice cream left on the counter, the mass of it still there, hard and cold, but almost soft enough to be able to scoop it out without bending a spoon.
7
“I think that woman came to see me when I was skating.”
Adrian turned from the hob where he was heating tomato soup and looked at Pearl. “What woman?”
“That woman we saw on my birthday. Jane.”
Adrian felt his color rise a little at the mention of her. “Hmm,” he said, turning down the heat as the soup started to boil.
“I knew you wouldn’t believe me.”
He gave the soup one last stir and turned to face her. “I didn’t say I didn’t believe you.”
“You said ‘hmm.’”
“I just meant, when? How? I mean, are you sure?”
Pearl scratched at the wood of the tabletop with her fingernails. “No,” she said, “I’m not sure. She was just sitting there, in the bleachers at Ally Pally, and it was like she was watching me. And I turned round and when I looked back again she was gone. And then we saw that woman, on my birthday, and I realized that it was the same woman. From Ally Pally.” She stopped and looked at Adrian anxiously.
Adrian pulled out a chair and sat down opposite his daughter. “How sure are you?”
“I don’t know. About seventy-five percent sure. Roughly.”
He nodded.
“Do you believe me?”
“I don’t know. Why are you only bringing this up now?”
“Cat told me about the phone. That’s what made me think I wasn’t being mad and that I could tell you.” She looked at him with those frosty blue eyes of hers, challenging him to disagree with her. “Why is she following us about?”
“She’s not following us about. She’s disappeared.”
“OK, then why was she following us about?”
“I don’t think she was . . .”
“So”—she looked at him pityingly and counted points off on her fingers—“first, she turns up here to look at a cat she doesn’t want, twice. Second, she’s watching me at skate training and third, she weirdly just happens to be there the night of my birthday dinner—”
“Coincidence.”
“Not coincidence, Dad. It’s written on the whiteboard.”
Adrian half opened his mouth to respond and then closed it again. He got to his feet and walked into the hallway. How had he not noticed? There it was, in red pen: Strada Upper St. 6:30 p.m.
He came back into the kitchen and sat down heavily. “OK,” he said, “you’re right. This is weird.”
“Stalker,” she said, folding her arms conclusively across her chest.
“Disappearing stalker,” he replied.
“Probably just as well.” Her eyes drifted over his shoulder. “That soup is boiling, Dad.”
Adrian leaped to his feet and turned off the heat under the soup. Then he poured it into two mugs and handed one to Pearl with a bread roll. This was their special thing: once a week, after skate training, Adrian picked her up and brought her here, gave her tomato soup and a bread roll. He did the same with the boys too; each had their own night. Another idea of Maya’s. One-on-one time, she’d called it.
“Are you going to try and find her?”
Adrian tore off a corner of his bread roll and held it suspended above his soup. “I don’t know,” he said noncommittally. “Maybe. I’ve bought a charger. For her phone. I’m going to keep it charged, in case she tries calling.”
“What’s she like? Is she nice?”
“Oh, really, I hardly know her. I mean, we literally had three very short conversations.”
“Maybe she was stalking me to see if she’d like me to be her stepdaughter?”
Adrian laughed. “I doubt that very much.”
Pearl dropped her gaze to the floor and sighed. “I don’t know if I want another stepmother.”
“Oh, Pearl, darling, you really don’t need to be thinking about stuff like that. Honestly. Three wives is enough for one man in one lifetime I think.”
Adrian rested his spoon in his bowl and closed his eyes. After his spiky lunch with Cat he was aware that he needed to handle this subject with
a deft touch. “You know, all the women I married, I married because they were absolutely the right person for me to be with at the time I was with them. I had no doubts about any of my marriages; I went into all of them wide-eyed with love and hope. And maybe that will never happen to me again. Maybe I’ll meet women and I’ll think they’re nice but they won’t be right for me like Susie was, like your mum was. And like Maya was.”
Pearl studied him intensely. “You will get married again,” she said. “You’re a love addict.”
Adrian swallowed back a smile at the sound of Caroline’s words being funneled through his youngest daughter. “Well, whatever happens, I promise I won’t do anything to make you unhappy.”
“You can’t promise that,” said Pearl, shaking her head. “You totally can’t promise that.”
8
The first weekend of May brought with it two birthdays, back-to-back: Caroline’s forty-fourth and Cat’s twentieth.
Adrian arrived at the town house in Islington holding the rope handles of two gift bags and a carrier bag full of champagne. It was a beautiful day: cool on the street, but red-hot in the sun trap of Caroline’s south-facing back garden. Susie was already there, looking incredibly old for a woman not yet fifty, her skin the wind-beaten hide of the seaside-dwelling gardener, her clothes not quite right for a birthday party: floppy canvas trousers and a rather worn-out muslin camisole which showed her bra. But her fine bone structure still took the eye, and her brilliant blue eyes.
